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SYBIL KNOX 


OE, HOME AGAIN 





















SYBIL KNOX 


OR, HOME AGAIN 

. A STOn T OF TO-DA T 


BY 

EDWARD E. HALE 

AUTHOR OF “east AND WEST,” “ THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY,” 
“in his name,” “ten times one is ten,” “life OF 
WASHINGTON,” “ LIFE OF COLUMBUS,” ETC. 



v.OirY’'-: 


fin 


NEW YORK ' 

CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY 

104 & 106 Fourth Avenue 




COPTHIQHT, 1892, BT 
CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY. 


All rights reserved. 


THE MER8HON COMPANY PRESS 
RAHWAY, N. J. 


SYBIL KNOX; 

OE, HOME AG Am. 


CHAPTER L 

I S it really the last time ? ” 

“It is really the last time,” said Mrs. 
Knox, “and you cannot think how hard it is 
to say so, for you have no such experience.” 

The place was one of the handsome rooms 
of the United States Minister in Rome ; the 
time was as one of his evening parties came to 
a close. The people were Mrs. Sybil Knox 
and John Coudert. She had made her head- 
quarters in Rome now for four winters, and 
was about to return to America after an 
absence of seven years. He had been in Rome 
twice — for the Easter festivities of two years, 
that is. To be candid with the reader, he had 
come the second time because, in all his work 


2 


SYBIL KNOX. 


and all his play of the summer and autumn, 
his mind had run back to this charming 
woman, and he was bold enough to try again 
to find what was the secret of the fascination. 

“I think,” said he, “ that our people here, 
the Americans — the colony, as they call them 
on the other side — had relied upon you as one 
of the permanent people, the fixtures. You 
will be sadly missed by such people ; and by 
the other kind, such people as I, who have 
tasted your hospitality.” 

“ You are all very good,” said she, hardly 
smiling, indeed almost sadly. “ It is a hard 
business, as all good-byes are. But I do not 
like to have people tell me they thought I was 
going to stay here I am sure I have always 
fiown my colors. There is my father’s Loyal 
Legion badge, now ; you see I wear it to-night, 
as I always do. And whenever there has been 
a chance I have soared with the spread eagle.” 

“Oh,” said Mr. Coudert, “no one thinks 
anybody is going to stay here more than one 
more winter.” 

“ And then next year never comes, any more 
than to-morrow comes. But I — I almost went 


SYBIL KNOJ{. 


3 


last year.” Then she paused, and said, rather 
resolutely, “I wish you would say to anybody 
and everybody that, while I like Italy and 
have enjoyed it to the full, I have stayed here 
really by accident. First — well, you do not 
know — it seemed every year as if Mr. Knox 
were getting better, and he always thought one 
more year would establish him. Then, when 
it was all over, my mother came ; then, you 
know, my sisters came. But I have always 
been beating my wings against the cage, 
though it is so large and so pretty. I shall let 
the girls go to Naples with your party, and 
when you come back the last strap will be 
tight around the last balla, and I shall be 
waiting on the steps of the palace. I shall not 
suffer them to come in to look for a lost hand- 
kerchief. ‘ Over the seas and far away,’ ” and 
now she succeeded in smiling. 

“Are you quite so sure you will like it at 
first ? ” said he doubtfully. 

“ Can yon say that ? Everybody else has 
said that, and I am fairly angry. As if I were 
a girl when I came away ! If anybody knows 
America I do.” 


4 


SYBIL KNOX. 


“Yery likely,” said Mr. Coudert. “But 
nobody does know America. The New Eng- 
landers hardly know New England, and they 
do not know what a ranch is, or a prairie. 
They believe in nothing ten miles beyond New 
York. As poor Lord Salisbury said, the scale 
of the maps is so small. The New Yorkers 
think they know New York, and do not know 
even that. Far less do they know the South, 
or what is to come from the Pacific shore. 
The other day I saw in a ‘ leading newspaper ’ 
a great head-line about ‘ Smoky Pittsburg.’ 
The man did not know that for four or five 
years the sky above Pittsburg has been like 
the sky above the Campagna. Indeed, if you 
know America to-day you do not know it to- 
morrow.” 

“ That is why one wants to live there,” said 
she proudly, and looking, as he thought, more 
charming than ever in her enthusiasm. “And 
why one wants to be there before one is quite 
hoary with age. You see I must go soon.” 

“You will find it hard to choose another 
Rome,” persisted he. 

“They tell me there are sixteen on the list 


SYBIL KNOX. 


6 


of post-offices,” she answered, laughing, “be- 
sides Roma and New Rome. But I shall not 
try any of these. I have no choice to make 
between cities.” 

“If you had, you would choose Washing- 
ton. 4.^ter Florence and Geneva, Washington 
is the most charming city in the world.” 

“Seville?” asked she; “or what’s the 
matter with Damascus ? ” 

“ They are not in America,” said he, catch- 
ing her own tone of the minute before. “ But 
if you are not going to any of these, where is 
it ? You do not mean to be a ranchera, or the 
Lady Bountiful of a bonanza farm in Da- 
kota ?” 

“ No, I shall not, though I have thought of 
that and thought seriously. For I should like 
to be of use somewhere. And really, Mr. 
Coudert, I am not quite a fool. 1 do know 
enough to — well, I can draw a cheque and I 
can sign a receipt for my dividends. Before 
my father died he called me his confidential 
clerk. And I am one of the women who 
would really like something to do.” 

He told her that he remembered she said 


SYBIL KNOX. 


something of the sort before, one day, when 
they had all made a party to Tivoli together. 
He knew in his own heart that it was this sort 
of ability to enter into affairs, as one who was 
of them and could be in them, which gave 
something of the charm which so many men 
found in her bright talk. And, at the same 
time, he shuddered when he compared her 
mentally with two or three “women of affairs” 
whom he had seen in his own country or in 
England, trying to show men that they are not 
fools, and hardly succeeding — the women who 
move “ to lay on the table,” or to “ refer to a 
committee of the whole.” 

“Life is life,” he said. “Of course the 
whole thing is comparative. I have put as 
much work on the slicing the section of the 
cell of a fern, and mounting it on a slide, as 
Mr. Gladstone puts into a treaty with Russia. 
And the good God cares as truly for the one 
as He does for the other. I suppose the 
Dakota bonanza farm does not much astonish 
Him.” 

It was John Coudert’s willingness to talk 
seriously which had interested Mrs. Knox in 


SYBIL KISrOX. 


7 


him the first time she saw him ; and which, 
indeed, distinguished him from the averaga of 
travelling ximericans who stopped to do Rome, 
before they went on to do Pompeii and Sor- 
rento. She was not unused to that habit of 
talk of his, and she knew it was genuine. 

“You have it precisely,” said she. “My 
principality is larger than the Prince of 
Monaco’s, I believe. It is smaller than a 
Dakota wheat farm. It is ‘ two hundred acres 
of woodland, be the same more or less ; two 
hundred acres of pasture-land, be the same 
more or less ; and one hundred and five acres 
of arable land, or meadow, be the same more 
or less ; together with [the homestead and 
barns and offices.’ ” All this she drawled out 
with admirable Yankee intonation, as if she 
were about to offer it for sale at auction. “ If 
it were described in an English novel they 
would say it was ‘all in a ring fence.’ For 
the truth is that it was a military grant made 
to one Gersliom Wood and his brother, after 
Queen Anne’s War ; and so it came down to 
my father. I could have told you the bound- 
aries once, they are so simple : ‘ Beginning at 


8 


SYBIL KNOX. 


a Stake and stones on tbe south side of Powder 
Horn Hill,’ and so on. 

“The homestead is to be my palazzo. The 
arable land will give me my dutj^, and the 
woodland will be my bui’den. You must all 
pray for me when you go to St. Peter’s, that I 
may not die land-poor.” 

“ I am not afraid of that,” said he, without 
restraining a tone of admiration. “ Somebody 
in the next town will develop a factory of hair- 
springs for watches, and then you will show 
that the charcoal from red oak is the only 
charcoal for their temper, and when I next see 
you you will be a bonanza queen in Madison 
Avenue, who has developed a nabobry from 
unknown qualities of carbon. No fear of be- 
ing land-poor. But ” 

“ Alwmys ‘ but,’ Mr. Coudert.” 

“But,” he went on, “I have lived in such 
a place. I have seen my mother fight with 
beasts in such a place.” He was even bitter 
now. “ Have you really asked yourself what 
it is to be alone in the centre of six hundred 
and forty acres, ‘ be the same more or less,’ — 
to meet no one for a month who does not 


SYLIL KNOX. 


9 


ask you if Mrs. Barrett would not be wiser if 
she turned the skirt of her frock, and who 
does not wonder why the doctor paints his 
buggy green when it was black before 1 ” 

“And why not?” she replied a little 
fiercely. “ The Countess yonder was dis- 
cussing with me just now the shade of the 
Princess’s velvet, whether ashes of roses was 
as becoming to her as Parma violet. Gossip 
is gossip. I am very tired of it here, and I do 
not believe it would be worse at Washington, 
or Cranberry Centre. At all events, I mean 
to try.” 

She was so eager, even so angry, as she 
spoke, that John Coudert knew he had 
struck home, and that he had touched the 
raw spot of which she herself was conscious. 
For himself, he believed that the eternal gos- 
sip which he satirized had brought his mother 
to her grave. He knew perfectly well that 
the reason why his sisters and he had agreed, 
with one consent, to sell [their fine old home, 
was that no one of them could abide the daily 
drizzle of that gossip, its summer showers, or 
its winter hail. Because his sisters were 


10 


SYBIL KNOX. 


afraid of it, they were spending winters in 
what he called disreputable attics in Paris — 
which were really rooms in elegant French 
pensions — and they sometimes spent summers, 
taking their chances of the gossip, at Elberon 
or Long Branch. He had not probed Mrs. 
Knox’s wound without some memory of other 
wounds, and of what had come of them. 

And so it was, in less than a fortnight from 
the time when she had been talking with John 
Coudert at the Minister’s, Mrs. Knox found 
herself on the after-deck of the fast steamer 
Tropic, on her fourth day out from Queens- 
town, on her way to America. This time she 
was not talking with John Coudert, but with 
another pleasant man. Judge Kendrick of 
Wisconsin. His wife, poor soul! was lying in 
her long chair, wrapped with rugs, speechless, 
and almost without sight or hearing, as she 
courageously bore her half-recovery from sea- 
sickness. Mrs. Knox’s young people were all 
below in their wretchedness. For herself, she 
was as well as ever, was happy that the thing 
was one-third over, and glad to renew her ac- 
quaintance with the Kendricks, which had 


SYBIL KNOX. 


11 


begun a year or two before, on the slope of 
Vesuvius. 

“ Yes, the world is a small world, in a 
way,” said she, and then, hardly expecting 
to be answered, “it is in a way a very big 
one.” 

“ So small,” said he, “ that when you meet 
a man once you may be sure that you, will 
meet him again — yes, or a woman. I met 
you at Vesuvius, ergo I meet you on the 
Tropic.'’’ 

“ I like to believe it,” said she, “ and let us 
hope that the spell may last after you have 
looked in on Milwaukee and I on my wood- 
lots. But I suppose there is in the notion a 
little of the Caesar’s boat element. It is like 
my Aunt Huldah’s aphorism.” 

“ I know Caesar and his boat, but I had 
not the pleasure of Aunt Huldah’s acquaint- 
ance.” 

“ No ? What a pity ! I thought everybody 
knew Aunt Huldah. Aunt Huldah said she 
had observed that if she lived through March 
she always lived through the year. It was 
like Caesar’s saying that his boats never up- 


12 


SYBIL KNOX. 


set. He was in a leaky one on the Ides of 
March.” 

“Yes, he was; but Aunt Huldah does not 
laugh me out of my certainty that all things 
are double, as it says in the Bible ” 

“ If you buy it in Oxford.” 

“Yes, or at the Queen’s printing-house. 
Tell me, if all things are not double, why I 
put down a letter from General Knox to 
George Washington the minute before I came 
on deck to meet you.” 

“ Or why I ate one of Kendrick’s biscuits in 
my stateroom before I came up to meet you.” 

“Excellent!” he said. “I confess I was 
astonished that you remembered our names so 
perfectly. It cannot be that yon will succeed 
so well in New York. How long since you 
have seen the Battery 1 ” 

“ Do not tell any one, but it is seven years — 
seven years and more. And sometimes it 
seems a thousand,” and she sighed. 

“ Are you prepared to be interviewed ? Five 
boats lying at quarantine, with the reporters 
of the Argus, the Tribune, the World, the 
Herald, and the Ring- Tailed Roarer, to 


SYBIL KNOX. 


13 


inquire how Mrs. Knox bore the passage, on 
what train she will leave, and whether she is 
favorably impressed by America.” 

‘ ‘ I shall shelter myself behind you and Mrs. 
Kendrick. They will be writing as fast as 
they can the answers to the questions, whether 
you approve of the original package decision, 
whether you stop at the Saratoga convention 
before going home, and whether you mean to 
offer yourself for the Presidency, or to wait for 
a nomination.” 

“No,” he said, with pretended sadness, “I 
shall not be interviewed. I am one of them- 
selves. Foxes do not talk to foxes, nor news- 
paper men to newspaper men.” 

“No? That is new.” 

“As true as new. Mr. Blaine would have 
been President long ago had he not began 
life as an editor. As it was, not an edi- 
tor between thirty and seventy but said in 
his heart, ‘ Jim Blaine President ? I might as 
well be President myself.’ ” 

“ How natural that is ! And how fortunate 
for women that they do not have to think of 
being President. To tell you the honest truth, 


14 


SYBIL KNOX. 


Judge Kendrick, there are a thousand things 
in which women’s talk and their thoughts 
differ from men’s.” 

“I have always said so,” said he, “but I 
have never heard but two women say it. You 
are one, and the other was twenty years old ; I 
was very much in love with her.” 

“Mrs. Kendrick, your husband is telling 
tales about you.” 

“ No, my dear Mrs. Knox, I hear him. He 
is talking about Bertha Angevine. It is not 
safe for him to tell how much he was in love 
with me.” 

“ What insight she has,” said her husband, 
in a stage whisper, “when I gave her such a 
mere hint to guess from. It was Bertha Ange- 
vine, long since Mrs. Dr. Abernethy, or Louis, 
or Camomile. I said that men had very little 
chance to think things out. It was only at 
church, when the sermon was long, that a man 
could carry out a line of thonght. She said 
she had noticed that, but that wmmen had lots 
of time, when they were sewing.” 

“It was true,” said Mrs. Knox. “It was 
true — then. But now, alas ! — now, they do 


SYBIL KNOX. 


15 


not sew much. They ‘put out their sewing,’ 
and it is done by steam or electricity, and 
they ” 

“ Go to weddings, my friend Haliburton tells 
me.” • 

“Do what?” 

“ Haliburton says that if his church is 
opened for the wedding of a little mouse of a 
button-hole maker, married to the third assist- 
ant of the fourth clerk of the bottle-washer — 
two people who have not lived a week in Bos- 
ton, and are married in church only because 
they hate the woman who keeps her boarding- 
house — Haliburton says that even at such a 
wedding as that, though it were Monday 
morning at eleven o’clock, his large chui’ch 
would be crowded. And Haliburton’ s infer- 
ence is that the average American woman, 
after ‘ her education is finished,’ has nothing 
in the world to do.” 

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Knox doubt- 
fully, after a moment; “I should have said 
that the trouble was the other way. The 
American girls, after they have left school, 
have seemed to me to be ‘ on a drive,’ as the 


16 


SYBIL KNOX. 


lumbermen say. I have not seen them in their 
homes for ten years. But they have talked to 
me when they were in Rome. What with 
their lessons, and causes, and Saturday clubs, 
and their charities, ^d their voting for the 
school committee, and their helping dear pajDa, 
and helping dear mamma, and at the same 
time going to Newport, and maintaining their 
relations to society — germans in the evening, 
and going to whist classes in the morning — I 
should not think they had much time to go to 
any weddings but their own.” 

“All I can say is,” he replied, “that Tuttle 
told me the other day that all the street car 
connection of the West End of Boston was de- 
ranged because a pretty girl was married at 
Trinity Church, and that things did not come 
to their bearings till an hour after Dr. Brooks 
blessed them. Perhaps that is Boston. I 
always heard that Boston was founded by 
church people, only I thought it was of another 
kind.” 

But Mrs. Knox did not listen ; so soon as she 
could speak without interrupting him, she 
pointed with her closed parasol at the cold sun. 


SYBIL KNOX. 


17 


which was making a wretched effort to peer 
through the fog. “ Why in the w'orld is it 
there ? Why is the sun in the west at ten 
o’clock in the morning 1 ” 

Sure enough the sun was on the starboard 
quarter. The ship was — not aiming at it, but 
going that way, somewhat to the left of the 
sun. 

“Is it the sun? It must be the sun,” said 
the Judge. But a queer, creeping feeling came 
over them all, as if for once the sun in these 
foggy days had risen in the west. He ran for- 
ward to find an ofiicer and inquire. He came 
back blank enough. Something had happened 
to the screw, or its connections. It was not 
thought wise to go on. The ship happened to 
be governed by a captain, and not by a caucus. 
She had, therefore, been headed back to Ire- 
land without consultation of the passengers. 
They would be notified in good time. Mean- 
while this information had been given to the 
Judge, because there was no reason why it 
should be hidden. 

“A week more !” groaned poor Mrs. Ken- 
drick. 


18 


SYBIL KNOX. 


“A week more ! ” said her husband, in a tone 
quite as abject ; “ and what will become of the 
meeting of the Full Bench, I am sure I do not 
know.” 

“A week more!” said Mrs. Knox, more 
wretched than either. Here was her brother 
waiting for her in New York ; here were 
twenty appointments with trustees — nay, here 
w'ere invitations which she had given, and 
which had been accepted by friends, at the re- 
established home. “A week more ! ” she said 
dismally. “The bottom is out from my tub. 
All my calculations are out of order.” 

“And what will they say when the Tropic 
does not arrive ? ” said poor Mrs. Kendrick. 

All the same, all parties had to accept the 
universe, whether they wanted to or no. In 
this case very few of them wanted to. There 
were one or two waifs of fortune who were glad 
to have the Tropic Steamshij) Company feed 
them for eighteen days instead of nine, for the 
same sum of money. There were two pair of 
young lovers who thought moonlight on deck 
“perfectly splendid,” and who, in a false 
astronomy, supposed that, while they were a.t 


SYBIL KNOX. 


19 


sea, the moon would not change. For the rest, 
it seemed impossible to adapt themselves to the 
new conditions. But it was not impossible, and 
somehow or other they adapted. 

Four days brought them back to Queens- 
town Harbor, and, as it was ordered, as they 
came to anchor in the bay, and the first officer 
went up with his tidings, the Antarctic, of the 
same line with them, came in, anchored oppo- 
site them, and sent for her American mails. 
She was on her outward voyage. A boat was 
at once sent across to her to know what chances 
there were for passage. But the reply was un- 
promising. The captain would give up his 
stateroom to any party of four. There were 
two berths for two men in staterooms only half 
peopled. “That is the whole ! ” This was the 
doleful reply of the surgeon. With absolute 
promptness, savoring of the western side of the 
Mississippi, Judge Kendrick claimed the cap- 
tain’s stateroom before any one else had begun 
to think about it. Two travelling salesmen 
took the two berths in the same way. The 
Kendrick girls ran downstairs to tell their 
mother, and to pack their stateroom luggage. 


20 


SYBIL KNOX 


All else, as they knew, must come by another 
vessel. Before the tug with the mails had 
delivered them, the boat was ready, and the 
Judge’s party were bidding good-bye. As Mrs. 
Kendrick took her place, somewhat shaken by 
the descent of the landing-ladder, she found, 
to her amazement, Mrs. Knox seated there 
already. 

“Not a word,” whispered Mrs. Knox. “I 
am a second-class passenger. Never fear. In 
the second class there is always room for one 
more.” 

A half-sovereign in one place and a sover- 
eign in another had settled all this while the 
others were packing. Mrs. Knox was sit- 
ting on the extensor which held her worldly 
goods, and trusted in the officers of the Tropic 
that the rest would follow. She ran upon the 
deck of the Antarctic with the Kendricks, and 
disappeared. 

She was wholly right in her surmise. For a 
second-class passenger, as for one in the steer- 
age, there is always room for one more. 


CHAPTER II. 


7IVE-D0LLAR gold piece, well bestowed 



-lJl. in the hands of the woman steward who 
had the oversight of second-class women, gave 
to Mrs. Knox a quiet berth, where her neigh- 
bor overhead was a frightened German woman, 
who became, as we shall see, her fast friend. 
For the rest, if it were not for the name sec- 
ond-class, which nobody likes, she was as well 
off as is the average traveller on any steamer of 
any line. She could not order a Welsh rarebit 
at midnight. But she would not have ordered 
one had she been a tirst-class voyager. The 
table was not very good, nor would it have been 
very good under any circumstances. The bed 
was clean, thanks to the five-dollar piece, and, 
as Mrs. Knox observed, it was a little larger 
than hers had been in the stateroom of the 
Tropic. The people whom she met at meals 
were all women, and all spoke German. As she 
spoke German, too, this did not in itself so 


22 


SYBIL KNOX. 


much matter. In fact, she was tired to death by 
the rush of the last week in Europe ; she knew 
she should spend fifteen hours of each twenty- 
four flat on her back, and, as it happened in this 
particular case, she had more air and bigger 
quarters in this part of her enterprise than she 
had before. 

It would have been quite impossible, as she 
well knew, to make this second-class passage 
tolerable for an instant in the eyes of any of 
her large party excepting herself. Indeed, 
there were too many of them for any move- 
ment which required such promptness. But, 
more than this, her nieces looked forward to 
the voyage home as one more lottery in the ex- 
perience of travel. It would not be fair to say 
that they looked forward to a week of mild or 
exciting flirtation, after their seasickness was 
over, but, at the very least, it was — well, let us 
say, an untried adventure : who there might 
be, whom one might meet, with a clean deck, 
long walks, and chances, by the hour, of talk in 
extension chairs. It was easy enough for Mrs. 
Knox to charge the escort men with the re- 
moval of her trunks in the hold, which, of 


SYBIL KNOX. 


23 


course, could not be found now. For herself, 
her stateroom ‘^plunder” must answer her 
purposes till all should come together again in 
America. 

Bertha Berlitz, the frightened German 
woman in the upper berth, who had been ter- 
ribly seasick already in the little experience of 
the sea since she sailed, was going to America 
in that sad search for a lost husband which re- 
peats itself so often, in the romance of two con- 
tinents. The sympathy and experienced kind- 
ness of Sybil Knox worked their inevitable 
way with the forlorn woman, and on the 
second day she was persuaded to sip a part of 
a cup of tea, to take a few spoonfuls of oat- 
meal porridge, and, at last, to try her feet 
again upon the deck. The experiment was a 
joy to her little girl, a nice, jolly little mad- 
chen of six or seven years, who had vanquished 
her seasickness, child-fashion, in a couple of 
hours, and had been won over to absolute con- 
fidence in Sybil Knox by that lady’s skill in 
creating paper dolls, and by the dramatic 
interest of the conversations which she made 
them maintain with one another. The mother 


24 


SYBIL KNOX. 


was, of course, grateful for sucli kindness 
to her little girl, though she was more shy 
than words can describe ; she yielded slowly 
to absolute kindness, and told to her new 
friend her history and her hopes. 

It had been a pure love-match, that was 
clear enough. And, until he left for America, 
there had been no break, there was no rival, 
there was no falsehood. A handsome boy and 
a pretty girl in a village in the Hartz Moun- 
tains — all just like a scene in an opera, or a 
story by Grimm. He v'as a forester in the 
government employ, but he was of the kind of 
forester which is at the bottom, and not the 
kind Avhich is at the top. That distinction 
reigns in forestry as in all the other vocations 
of feudal countries. That is to say, there is 
one sort of j)eople who do the hard work and 
have poor pay. And there is another sort of 
people, who wear a little or much gold lace on 
their clothes, who ride about on horses, tell 
the other people Avhat to do, though they 
don’t know so much about it, and have good 
pay. After their dear little Rudolph died 
Gerhard had said he would have no more of it. 


SYBIL KNOX. 


25 


He said the boy was the same as if he had 
starved to death. This was not true, as poor 
Bertha explained volubly. But it was true 
that Rudolph had not had the same food or 
the same comfort as he would have had were 
,he a baron’s son. Nay, the baron’s son, a 
sickly boy, was alive when Bertha told all this 
sad tale. Any way, Rudolph’s death had 
made Gerhard unhappy and discontented. 
He said he knew all there Avas to be known 
about forests, and that a new country where 
there are forests was the place for him. So he 
left her and Clarchen with the grandfather 
and grandmother, and with two hundred 
thalers he went to America to make ready for 
them to come. 

And there had been letters — five letters — 
all which poor, half-widowed Bertha had, 
wrapped up in a piece of parchment, and then 
slipped all together in a red-flannel bag. Not 
on the first, nor the second, nor the third day, 
but before the voyage was over, these precious 
letters were entrusted to Mrs. Knox, that she 
might, if she could, solve the mystery why 
there were no more. 


26 


SYBIL KNOX. 


Alas ! there is always one solution, when 
there are no more, in such cases — the solution 
which, of course, poor Bertha would not state 
in words, nor, indeed, would Sybil Knox. 
First, there were two letters from New Bei’gen, 
a little place not far from New York, where 
he had found work, at what seemed marvellous 
wages, as a gardener. Then there was one from 
New Pfalz, in the State of New York, more 
inland. Then he had worked his way to 
Rochester, and w^as at work in a nursery. 
There were enthusiastic stories of the peaches 
and pears and plums which Clarchen was to 
eat when she came over. There was no hint 
of declining interest. There was nothing 
from which that “other woman” could be 
suspected, who is so ajit to appear when an 
ocean has come into a drama. But the second 
Rochester letter spoke of an engagement to go 
to the West, with yet another nurseryman. 
She was still to write to Rochester, for he 
would be back when her letter came. Then 
there was one letter written on the train, and 
dated “Liberty” — just a line to say that he 
was well. Of this letter, alas, the cover and 


SYBIL KNOX. 


27 


postmark had been lost. And these were 
all. 

Mrs. Knox sighed a long sigh as she half- 
explained what she did not dare express 
wholly — how many Libertys there were. 

Such was the clew by which a husband was 
was to be discovered, who himself gave no sign 
where he was. Was he dead, alas, or was 
there “ the other woman ” ? 


CHAPTER III. 


J UDGE KENDRICK evidently leaned to 
the impression that the “other woman” 
had carried the lost Berlitz off. If so he 
doubted whether any pursuit would avail. 
“ He has only to change his name to Brown or 
Jones — they all do,” he said, “and it is all 
over.” 

For Judge Kendrick had, at the very first, 
after his household was established in the cap- 
tain’s stateroom, come down to offer his berth 
to Mrs. Knox. If she said she was comfort- 
able, she gave him new reason to say that he 
would be as comfortable, and she would be such 
a comfort to his wife. There was more than 
one first-class passenger of her old friends of 
travel ready to make the same proposal, as soon 
as it was whispered, in the New England section 
of the three hundred first-class passengers 
on the Tropic, that that nice Mrs. Knox, who 
received so pleasantly in the Via Sabina, was 

2S 


SYBIL KNOX. 


29 


in the second cabin. There were half a dozen 
gentlemen, who had enjoyed her hospitality, 
whose wives sent them to her with the same 
invitation the Judge had brought to her. But 
she was steel to their entreaties. Wild horses 
should not drag her into the first cabin, she 
said. No ; the captain was not to be asked if 
she might not sit on the upper deck with them. 
Discipline was discipline, and she was well 
pleased with her German and Yorkshire 
friends. She always had been tempted to take 
a steerage passage. This was not that. But, 
if a word more were said, she would go into the 
steerage, and then none of them could find 
her. 

All the same the Judge used to make a call 
on her every day and take a constitutional 
with her. She would give him this hour. 
And, of course, she consulted him about 
Bertha Berlitz’ s chances. 

“Poor enough, you would say,” said he. 
“ Still, if the man were alive, or if, as I say, 
the other woman were not alive, they would be 
ninety in a hundred. You say he was in 
Rochester. That means he is in the nursery 


30 


SYBIL KNOX. 


business. That means he is in or near some 
large town. Now do you know that so perfect 
is the administration at Washington ” 

“Are you laughing?” said she, a little 
annoyed. 

“Laughing? Not at all. The administra- 
tion at Washington is the despair of Europe. 
It is only our own habit of finding fault that 
has taught you anything else. Do you believe 
that in Russia, or even in Paris, there is a staff 
like what there is at Washington, of accom- 
jilished men and women whose business it is 
to find Gerhard Berlitz ? If you drop a letter 
into the post-office the day you land, addressed 
Gerhard Berlitz, America, and it have anything 
of value enclosed in it, this staff will work 
on it. If he is alive, if he have not changed 
his name, if he live in a large town or city, 
they will find him. I mean that they have a 
library of directories, one from each large town 
and city, and that somebody will turn up 
‘Berlitz, Gerhard’ in every directory, and that 
each man witb that name in those cities will 
have a chance at the letter. Unless, indeed, 
one of them is so mean as to take it from 


SYBIL KNOX. 


31 


the office and not return it for another 
trial.” 

“ You give me good hope,” she said, “ for I 
have Bertha’s confidence in him. There is no 
‘ other woman.’ ” 

“But always ” 

“Yes, always,” she said sadly. “Why 
should he live when so many others die ? I 
have tried to recall what railway tragedies there 
were that year. He — it is fifteen months ago.” 

“Yes, well; hope if you can; make her 
hope. Quien sahe ? — it may yet come well.” 

And such was the modicum of expectation 
with which Mrs. Knox took Bertha Berlitz’s 
affairs in hand. What would have happened 
to Bertha Berlitz if the Tropic had not turned 
round, she never inquired. As it was, the 
Tropic had turned round. And as she had, 
Sybil Knox had shared Bertha Berlitz’s bed- 
room. And as she had, their destinies seemed 
to flow as one. 

Yes, when they were in the long shed on the 
pier in Kew York after arriving, the shed where 
people identify baggage, and give their keys 
to custom inspectors, Mrs. Knox’s baggage 


32 


SYBIL KNOX. 


almost passed itself, it was so little. Blessed 
are they who have no luggage, for they do not 
have to wait for the custom-house. This is a 
true proverb. But she would not desert Bertha 
— no, not though she were wild to go to Macy’s 
and to find something which she could wear 
within and without. The day gave every 
promise of being one of the tremendously hot 
days of early spring. Mrs. Knox had met her 
welcome to America in the shape of a note 
from her near friend, Mrs. Lagrange, to whose 
house she Avas going at once. One of the chil- 
dren was poorly, and the doctor had sent them 
all to Lenox earlier than she expected. Still 
the house was open. Mary Connor would see 
that all was comfortable, and here was John 
with the note, to be of any service. So was it, 
that at the first instant of return to her oavu 
country Mrs. Knox found herself alone in New 
York— alone, but that she had attached to her- 
self a German woman, who could not speak a 
word of English, and her child. 

Now there was absolutely nothing which she 
would not do with Lucy Lagrange, or which 
Lucy Lagrange would not do with her. Had 


SYBIL KNOX. 


33 


Lucy telegraphed from Lenox : “ Send me your 
diamond bracelet by express,” she would have 
done it. She had not had the least question 
but that she could take Bertha and Clarchen 
in the carriage with her to Lncy’s house, keep 
them there while she stayed, and carry them 
with her. But, before the name of this un- 
known Mary Connor, she trembled. She did 
not dare carry Bertha to her. She looked at 
the faultless John, in his matchless livery, and 
she was a good deal afraid of him. But she 
did not let him know this. He did know al- 
ready why she had no luggage, and he under- 
stood very readily why she did not go with 
him uptown. 

"What would the poor Fi’au Berlitz have done 
were there no Mrs. Knox ? This question pre- 
sented itself to that lady, and to Judge Ken- 
drick and Mrs. Kendrick, all of whom were 
trying to solve the problem. 

There was a grave, business-like looking man 
on one side of the shed who had a party of 
twenty-odd Norwegians in hand. They were 
sitting on their trunks till a lost trunk should 
be found, and waiting his command to move. 


34 


SYBIL KNOX. 


Mrs. Knox had noticed them on the voyage as 
decent iieople, among the steerage passengers, 
who kept very much to themselves. Would 
not their leader perhaps take Bertha and Clar- 
chen to a decent boarding-house, where she 
conld stay for a day or two ? Judge Kendrick 
made the inquiry. Alas ! the man was a Mor- 
mon elder, and the people were Mormons. “If 
only we had been Latter Day Saints we should 
have been provided for,” said Sybil Knox 
afterward. And all three of the councillors 
wondered why the Mormon corner of the 
Church of Christ was the only corner that 
seemed to care for this business of taking 
strangers into a new land. 

“It is all nonsense,” said Mrs. Kendrick, 
under the impulse of this wonder. “ Fred, we 
will take them with us to Harriet’s. They may 
just as well stay at New Rochelle, till some- 
thing turns up, as be poking about here in this 
ideal German boarding-house which none of us 
know how to find.” To this her husband 
agreed willingly, Mrs. Knox unwillingly. But 
she had to give way. New Rochelle is not an 
hour from New York, and Mrs. Kendrick had 


SYBIL KNOX. 


85 


been at home there till she was married. 
Bertha’s big trunk should be stored at No. 999 
West Fifty-second Street in Lucy Lagrange’s 
palace. Bertha should go with the Kendricks 
to New Rochelle, and Sybil Knox should stay 
in NewYorkasshe had proposed, while she re- 
fitted for her summer adventures. So soon as 
the custom-house people were satisfied, John, in 
all his grandeur, was told that the coachman 
might take Mrs. Knox to Arnold & Constable’s. 
Judge Kendrick, who called himself from that 
moment a Mormon elder, took his wife and 
the German contingent across to the Forty- 
second Street Station, and Frau Berlitz’ s enor- 
mous chest was confided to an expressman to 
carry to Mrs. Lagrange’s. There it was to 
remain till Mrs. Knox should be ready to go 
to her own home. 

By this time it was nearly eleven. By this 
time, therefore, it was certain that they took 
their lives in their hands in these adventures. 
The people in the streets seemed to know that 
something was in the air, such as was not al- 
ways expected. There was not the smart tread, 
the I-care-for-nobody ” swing, properly in- 


36 


SYBIL KNOX. 


dicative of the cross streets in lower New York. 
Rather there was a doubtful and even slow 
movement, unlike the laziness of Burgos, un- 
like the indifference of Messina, but unmistak- 
able. Even the impassive coachman, as he took 
the order for Arnold & Constable, deviated so 
far from the statutes of his pi’ofession as to ask 
if Mrs. Knox would need the horses long. 
Whether the danger of a hot day to the horses 
were in his mind, or whether lie doubted how 
long he could live in that livery coat, he did 
not say. 

For it is what in local dialect is called a 
“peeler.” It was one of the awful days 
when the “hot wave,” which has been long 
predicted and failed, delivers itself, all unan- 
nounced, on the wretched dwellers in cities. 
Higher and higher the thermometer ; more 
and more muggy the air ! Within the great 
warehouses you felt for the moment cooler, but 
even there the lassitude of Southern India was 
on everybody. Mrs. Knox herself felt that it 
was madness to attempt thought as to tempo- 
rary costume. She withdrew from the grandeurs 
of her first plans immediately. She ordered 


SYBIL KNOX. 


37 


the great coachman to take her to Macy’s, 
“ Where, my dear, I was able to get some 
things I conld live in, till my trunks came,” 
and then, to the undisguised joy of the great 
coachman and the greater John, gave the order 
for “ Home.” 

Home, indeed ! What a satire ! Is this 
home ? To a woman seven years from home, 
is this what she has eaimed ? Somehow the 
memory of “seven years” brought back to 
Mrs. Knox a scripture recollection. As she 
went up the steps, as John opened the door 
with a pass-key, as her eyes fell on linen covers 
in the drawing-room, which was dark with 
close-drawn curtains, she said to herself, ‘ ‘ He 
bargained for Rachel, and lo ! it was Leah.” 
Mrs. Mary Connor appeared, respectful, but 
so limp. Had Mrs. Knox had any lunch? 
There should be something in fifteen minutes, 
only John had telephoned that they should 
lunch downtown. 

“ Yes — no — really, Mrs. Connor, I think 
a bath is all I need. Perhaps — yes, a 
little beef-tea after it. You see, Mrs. Con- 
nor, I am not quite used to the climate yet.” 


38 


SYBIL KNOX. 


As if any one were ever used to a 
“peeler” ! 

And this was her welcome home ! Poor 
Sybil Knox ! 

But the bath did its perfect work. No, she 
knew that she could not have had these perfect 
appurtenances in Rome. There were new de- 
vices for faucets. There was a new invention 
for a sponge-basket. There was ingenuityj and 
prettiness, and nicety everywhere, and there 
was water, cold water, and Mrs Knox was her- 
self again. 

And the lunch was not ’confined to beef-tea. 
Mrs. Connor was on her mettle, if the day was 
a “ peeler,” and gradually a little appetite de- 
veloped itself. And so at two o’clock Sybil 
sat at the front window, wondering how she 
was to kill the afternoon, but feeling’as able to 
kill it as if it w'ere Hercules. Inspiration came, 
and she rang. 

“Mrs. Connor, it is so hot that I think I 
will go by the afternoon train. When the ex- 
pressman comes with the great box I told you 
of ” 


SYBIL KNOX. 


39 


And at that moment the cart drew up before 
the door. 

“ I will speak to him myself, Mrs. Connor,” 
and she rushed to the door. 

“Could you take that trunk right away to 
the Forty-second Street Station?” 

The man looked amazed. He had Just come 
from that place. But his hand closed on what 
in some languages is called a silver cart-wheel, 
— the dollar of the modern coinage. He was 
then certain he could return. 

“And may I go with you — on your seat, you 
know ? ” 

The man was amazed, but had no objection. 
Mrs. Connor was more amazed. ,The great 
John was most amazed of all. But he brought 
down Mrs. Knox’s extensor. 

“I will write to Mrs. Lagrange myself. I 
shall be just in time for the train. Thank you 
ever so much, and good-bye.” So, to the hor- 
ror of the great John, she stepped lightly to 
the teamster’s seat, even took the man’s whip 
from his hand as he mounted beside her, and 
drove in triumph down the Fifth Avenue to 
the station. 


40 


SYBIL KNOX. 


She amused herself, as she went by, wonder- 
ing what any of her elegant Roman guests 
would say should they meet her. But at such 
an hour as this, on such a day as this, none of 
them were visible. The teamster was pleased 
with her readiness, and she with his. She had 
done the impossible. Frau Berlitz' s huge 
chest was checked for Bennington County, and 
Mrs. Knox had twenty minutes left, to find 
Frau Berlitz herself. As she had expected, 
that excellent woman, with her child, was sit- 
ting in the corner of the station awaiting the 
arrival of the Kendricks. Sybil Knox ex- 
plained to her that all plans were changed. 
She left a note for the Judge with the parcel 
man in the corner, and at three o’clock all 
three were off to try to be at ‘‘ home again.” 


CHAPTER IV. 

M rs. KNOX had not seen the interior of 
a day palace car for eiglit years. She 
had seen nothing like one in crossing from 
Rome to Liverpool. 

As for poor Frau Berlitz and her little girl, 
they were too much dazed to be excited or sur- 
prised about anything. But Mrs. Knox was 
amused and interested. She had lived in a 
palace before — if ‘‘palace” be the English of 
“palazzo” — and she pleased herself by an ♦ 
analysis of her surroundings, which showed 
how much she had here which she had not 
there — how much she had there which she had 
not here ; and, in short, how little the two 
palaces were like each other. 

The P. P. C. man came and told her how 
much was the rent of the palace for a day, and 
she paid her part of it. It occurred to her that 
for her apartment in it, and the frau’s and the 
little fraulein, she paid at rather higher rates 

41 


42 


SYBIL KNOX. 


than she had paid in Italy for the same period 
in the larger apartments which she occupied in 
a larger palace there. And then she pleased 
herself with comparing the P. P. C. man with 
the people who attend to the daily needs of 
the Italian palace ; and that question recurred, 
so curious to all travellers just returning from 
Europe, how is it that a P. P. C. man does not 
bid good-bye, but is the person to welcome 
you, perhaps on your first experience of palace 
life. 

The company was a day company — that is, 
it consisted mostly of women. A few gray- 
whiskered men came into the car, before it 
started, and kissed the lonely daughters, who 
were to go forth unescorted and alone to the 
journey of life. Then there was one quartette 
who were, most clearly, a bride and bride- 
groom, with the attendant best man and first 
bride-maid. The lavishness of flowers showed 
this — the lady’s absolutely new boots showed 
it. No woman except a bride travels in boots 
fresh from the shop. If these signs had failed, 
it would have been certain that these two 
young people had been only just now married. 


SYBIL KNOX. 


43 


because the husband never left the bride on 
any pretext. He feared that some Sabine rape 
would capture her if she were out of his sight 
for a moment, and would take her to some 
new-built towers of some unnamed Rome. 

All these details Mrs. Knox gradually 
worked out as they rode, and as the peerless 
view of the Hudson, more beautiful to her than 
ever, unrolled itself before her. No, the news- 
boy could not tempt her with his books. They 
were of names unknown to her. The paper 
was thick with lime which had been wrought 
into the pulp. A special sort of paper, very 
thick, is made for just that sort of literature 
where it is supposed that you want most for 
your money, and also supposed that you will 
not see that salesman again. But at the first, 
Mrs. Knox did not care to read. 

The boy offers you books first, because if you 
take a book it costs at least thirty-five cents. 
He offers you magazines on his second visit, 
because you may buy Lend a Hand, which 
will cost only twenty cents. Not till his third 
round does he offer you Harper’s WeeTdy or 
the Bazar ^ because these are cheaper still. 


44 


SYBIL KNOX. 


She did buy a pretty child’s book for the 
younger of her companions. She found in 
her bag a copy of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” ele- 
gantly illustrated, which she had borrowed 
from Mrs. Lagrange’s house for just this emer- 
gency. The news-boj'^, changing his occupa- 
tion, now became the purveyor of fruit for the 
palace, and Mrs. Knox bought bananas for the 
amazed German mother and her child, who 
had never seen such fruit before, and began to 
believe that the wonders which they had heard 
of, incredulous, were all likely to prove true. 

Mrs. Knox threw olf all her “things” which 
could be dispensed with. Men have no such 
extra “things” in summer, unless the eti- 
quettes permit them to sit in their shirt sleeves, 
as in Western cars you sometimes do. But 
women always have some extra, w'hich, if their 
balloon were sinking, could be flung away. 
The air was hot, but not so hot as the street- 
car in New York had been, nor as Madison 
Avenue had been, when she sat at the team- 
ster’s side. 

She did not want to read ; yet she pleased 
herself with going to the palace library, which 


SYBIL KNOX. 


45 


she had noticed as she entered, that she might 
see what was provided for crowned heads on 
their travels. She had taken, at random, a 
volume from the ‘^ Little Classics,” and was 
just returning to her seat with it, when a lady 
stepped out from the little drawing-room,” 
so called, and raised both her hands : ‘‘Sybil 
Furness — it is certainly you ! or Sybil Knox, 
I ought to say.” 

The traveller, seeking for home — disap- 
pointed to this moment — felt now that she had 
found it. 

“ My dear Jane, is it really you ? ” and the 
two kissed each other, with kissing which was 
real kissing. No obtrusive veil, or coy cheek, 
but the kiss of four lips which means affec- 
tionate joy of meeting. 

A seat was found big enough for both in the 
little cabin, where were Mrs. Wildair and her 
daughter. The daughter, after she had been 
shown to Mrs. Knox, was sent to occupj^ her 
seat. And the two old schoolmates, who had 
not seen each other for ten years — not since 
they left Miss Porter at Farmington, with 
all life before them — now plunged into the 


46 


SYBIL KNOX. 


Odyssey and JEneids of their adventures and 
wanderings since those days. 

The joy of Sybil Knox at the meeting was 
indescribable. Till now, indeed, she had not 
known that she was disappointed in her ar- 
rival. But she had been disappointed. Some- 
thing had weighed on her which she would not 
analyze. The truth was that, though she had 
not expected to be interviewed, and had not 
supposed that the sarnepeople would be -waiting 
on the pier to wave handkerchiefs, who waved 
them when she sailed — ah ! in other days in- 
deed ! — though she had not expected this, she 
had thought somebody would know her. But 
nobody had known her, and she had known 
nobody. Even the Lagranges’ servants had 
been new people. There was a nice girl, in old 
times, at one particular counter at Macy’s, but 
that girl had gone. 

“Really, my dear child, I have spoken to 
nobody since I left the ship, except porters, and 
tide-waiters, and shopkeepers, and the people 
at Arnold’s and Macy’s.” 

“And you just home after a century! 
Well, now we have all the afternoon — you are 


SYBIL KNOX. 


47 


going to Atherton, of course — and we shall be 
together all the way to the Junction. Poor, 
dear child ! you shall do all the talking. You 
know I never say a word.” And then they 
laughed at the old joke, for Jane was the most 
incorrigible talker of her year. 

She, too, had married, and as she had never 
seen Sybil’s husband, Sybil had never seen 
hers. He was a prosperous director of marble 
quarries, not a hundred miles behind Rutland. 
She had just seen her sister and her new hus- 
band sail for Germany, and was now going 
home to preside in the vacation revels of the 
girls whom she had summoned from north, and 
south, and east, and west. “ I have to bring 
them together to wake us all up. We should 
be the least bit rusty, you know, if everj'- sum- 
mer some of them did not come in and show 
us the last sweet thing about tennis. John’s 
brother and his wife, whom you will like, 
always have a party of young people. And it 
helps along if I fill up the old house — one of 
the old Yankee palaces, you know — nine 
rooms on the ground floor and three in the ell, 
and the whole three stories high, with attics in 


48 


SYBIL KNOX. 


the gambrel. No, we shall not be crowded. 
I do wish you would stop a week and see how 
we go on.” 

“ I am not sure but I had better,” said Sybil 
Knox, with the least touch of sadness this 
time. “I ought to learn how. You know I 
have to sweep and dust mine. I have to drive 
out the ghosts, and, I suppose, to change the 
carpets. I do not know that I shall find a cur- 
tain to the windows. I find a letter from old 
Mary Chittenden, and she says that there are 
potatoes in the bins, and that Micah Straw 
does not know but what perhaps he can let us 
have milk. So I am sure I shall not starve. 
But for the rest, I must get things in 
order.” 

“ What fun ! ” cried the jubilant and enter- 
prising Jane Wildair. “I wish I could go 
over with you. We will diive across some day 
and help — it is only nine miles. But I am sure 
Mary Chittenden would not apimove- of me. 
My Mary Chittenden — the women who runs 
me — is named Tryphosa. She frowns severely 
on my extravagances, though she is really ten 
times as wasteful as I. And she scolds the 


SYBIL KNOX. 


49 


young folks all the time, and always ends in 
letting them have their own way.” 

“ Shall I feel lonely, Jane ? ” • 

“ No ; you will not. Some people would ; 
but you will make friends. You will meet 
people more than half-way ; that is all they 
want. Proud as Lucifer is every man and 
every woman. And good as gold is every 
woman and every man, when you need real 
friends. No; you will not feel alone.” 

“But, Jane, everybody says that I shall 
be killed with gossip ; everybody says that I 
shall have to talk of Mrs. Green’s blue ribbons, 
and Mrs. Black’s white cow. Now, lam not 
grand. Least of all am I ‘cultured.’ If I 
thank God for anything it is that I was 
brought up by people who did not know what 
‘culture’ was. But for all that I do not 
want to talk all day about cows and ribbons — 
and, in general, other people’s affairs.” 

She saw, before her sentence was half done, 
that she had struck on a chord whose vibra- 
tions grated. The irrepressible Jane was, for 
once, repressed, and when she spoke she 
spoke slowly. 


50 


SYBIL KNOX. 


“You have hit home,” she said. “That is 
the danger of life, where five hundred people 
see each other, and do not often see any one 
besides. But, my dear Sybil, was there any 
act of Parliament which said that you and 1 
should not meet some trials? Is it not your 
business, as it certainly is mine, highly to 
resolve that people shall not talk about black 
cows and white ribbons where you and I do the 
listening ? I know I have made this the law 
in my house and in Lysander’s. And, Sybil, 
the hardest people to bind down to keep the 
law, are these gay girls from New York who 
come up to play tennis in summer.” 


CHAPTER V. 


OUSEKEEPING proved easier than 



J — L Sybil Knox had dared to hope. Mary 
Chittenden was no fool, and the substantials of 
life, and many of its elegancies, had been well 
provided for. She found she should have 
enough to do in putting things on a “peace 
establishment,” as the old books used to say. 
But, if she had had any fear that she was to 
be starved, or in any way physically uncomfort- 
able, that fear soon gave way. None of the 
neighbors had promised any more than Micah 
Straw had promised. But the physical sup- 
plies were, in fact, ample. And, although she 
had no Fulton Market, she soon found that in 
a region where she had within a half-mile 
eggs, trout, poultry, lamb or mutton, pease 
and beans, she was not going to die of famine. 
On Saturday her brother came over, with all 
messages and offers of help from his house- 
hold, at the mill village of Bowdoin. They 


51 


62 


SYBIL KNOX. 


were some twenty miles from her. He “gave 
her points ” as to a thousand matters in the life 
she was resuming, and they had great comfort 
together in going back over old memories. 

She found, to her grief, that the old meet- 
ing-house of the village was closed. It had 
been voted that it should be painted, within 
and without. A vacation to the minister had 
also been voted, and the church was in the 
hands of the carpenters and painters. But 
Sybil said she must go somewhere for worship. 
And it was easily arranged that this some- 
where should be at the new meeting-house, as 
it had been called for twenty years, some four 
miles away, at the Quarry village. 

As it happened, the last service in which she 
had taken part was in Notre Dame in Paris. 
Her party had sat there in a gallery above the 
chancel, where the whole movement of priests 
and of people went on below them, and the 
noble music of the ceremony rolled in upon 
them from one side, without their seeing choir 
or organist. Here, at the Quarry meeting- 
house, they were, and they felt that they were, 
a part of those ministering servants of the Lord, 


SYBIL KNOX. 


53 


who were, in whatever feeble fashion, trying 
to join with angels and archangels, Cherubini 
and Seraphim, in His praise. ‘‘So ranch 
gained, at least,” Sybil Knox said to herself, 
and for so much she thanked^he good God, as 
she bent in silent prayer. 

For the place itself the contrast was even 
more distinct. There was a distinct chancel, 
separated by a rail from the part occupied by 
the congregation, and carpeted, as their part 
was not. It was one step higher than the floor 
of the church. Two steps higher, in a semi- 
circular recess, which ran farther back than 
the rest of the church, stood a mahogany 
pedestal, shaped like the drawings of a Greek 
altar, on which was a desk, on which was a 
large Bible. This was both reading-desk and 
pulpit. 

The church itself was ceiled with the rich 
unpainted pine of the region from bottom to 
top, and on both sides of the sloping roof, 
which was not shut off from the rest. The 
various colors of the wood gave a rich tone to 
the interior, far more effective, for architectural 
or aesthetic purpose, than any painting but the 


64 


SYBIL KNOX. 


very best could have been. But the native 
eagerness for colors had shown itself also. 
For every pane of the large windows had been 
masked, so to speak, by pasting over the glass 
some tawdry paper print, which, in crude 
colors, represented what some one, who had 
never seen a stained glass window, supposed 
such a window to be. The moisture of the air 
had detached some of these papers, so that 
they hung in ragged festoons from their stays. 
But most of them remained to give a wretched 
suggestion of “dim religious light.” That 
there might be something for children to look 
on and admire, when the words of the speaker 
did not interest them, twenty or thirty very 
large colored prints of scenes in the lives of 
David and Solomon were nailed upon the 
walls. The decorations of Christmas had 
triumphed over any suggestions of Lent which 
had ever been heard there, and the nails which 
held these pictures were still hung with w'reaths 
of holly, though it was almost summer. 

When the party from Atherton entered the 
church, the people assembled ivere singing. 
This was not as part of the regular service, but 


SYBIL KNOX. 


55 


as a sort of friendly exercise in music among 
themselves, and this singing of one and another 
familiar hymn went on until precisely the time 
of service. Then the leader of the singing laid 
down his book and walked up the central aisle, 
up the steps to the higher platform, opened 
the Bible, and marked the places where he 
meant to read. For it proved that he was the 
preacher. 

He was rather awkward in movement. His 
face and hands were those of a man a good 
deal exposed to the weather. His dress was 
of simple black, his necktie was black, and 
there was nothing in all his costume to suggest 
any difference between his occupation aud 
that of any other man dressed in black whom 
you might meet in a shop or on the train. 
Mrs. Knox fancied that he was almost aggres- 
sively “secular” in his way of moving his 
chair when he sat down, and of throwing his 
great-coat on another chair. But here she was 
wrong. He had never associated the idea of 
ritual with his movements at or near the pul- 
pit; indeed, he had never seen any one who 
had. Simply, he meant to do what was to be 


56 


SYBIL KNOX. 


done before the service began, and he did it in 
what was the most natural way. 

He read a hymn— the congregation found it 
in their books as he did so, and rose. "When a 
young girl, with a face of a saint, which Mrs. 
Knox thought one of-tlie sv/eetest she ever saw, 
walked quietly to a reed organ which stood in 
front of the pews, took her seat, and began to 
play the tune. Fortunately, as these visitors 
thought, the girl faced the whole congregation, 
so that they were able to watch that sweet face 
without rudeness, and to enjoy the shades of 
expression which passed over it as she tried, 
with the wretched whine of the reeds, to give 
some dignity to Lowell Mason’s music, and 
Oliver Holden’s. The people sang promptly 
and heartily. Mrs. Knox joined with them, 
and had, by this time, well forgotten Notre 
Dame. She knew that she was ordained her- 
self to certain services in the business the good 
God has in hand, and it was a comfort to her 
that the ceremonial in which they engaged 
recognized her ordination. All parties stood 
while they sang ; then all sat down suddenly, 
and bowed their heads upon their hands, rest- 


SYBIL KNOX. 


57 


ing upon the seats before them, but no one 
kneeled, if, indeed, kneeling had been physi- 
cally possible, as the seats were arranged. 
Mrs. Knox heard no invitation to pray, but the 
minister, without book or audible invitation to 
the people, addressed “Almighty God, our 
Father in Heaven” ; and in words at first 
broken, and perhaps a little disconnected, came 
more and more to a plea with God that He 
would reveal Himself then and there, and the 
hope that they who were addressing Him 
might come into the consciousness of such 
presence of His. So earnest and so eager did 
he become that he even shouted at times, and 
poor Sybil Knox was startled from her devo- 
tion to a wish, almost angry, that the man was 
not there. Then the reality of his tone gave 
her the certainty again that he was not acting, 
or pretending to anything not real, and she 
fell back more humble and less critical. Still, 
as she said afterward, it was all a series of 
surprises. She was tossed high, or she sank 
low. What she did not say in words was still 
true, that there were moments, which she 
could not count nor measure, when she was 


58 


SYBIL KNOX. 


wholly lost in her certainty of our Father’s 
love. 

At the end the whole congregation joined, 
audibly, with the minister in the Lord’s 
Prayer. 

At once, as soon as he had said “Amen,” the 
minister read the nineteenth Psalm, and then 
a lesson from one of the Epistles, and at once, 
again, he gave out a hymn. All this celerity 
of movement jarred on Sybil, used so long to 
the gravities of European rituals. The ques- 
tion even passed through her mind, was there 
a horse waiting outside, and would the min- 
ister mount and ride to another “station” as 
soon as this service was ended ? She asked 
herself if she had not heard of such things in 
the lives of missionaries or other pioneers. 
Here, again, she was quite wrong. This was 
merely the indication, in an affair of ritual, of 
the national eagerness to get on and not to lose 
time. The people had never asked their min- 
isters to hurry. Nor had the ministers, in any 
convention, voted that they would take as 
little time as possible. But in everything that 
they did in daily life the habits of two cen- 


SYBIL KNOX. 


59 


turies Iiad required haste. The distances to 
be travelled were large, the forests to be hewn 
down were dense, the work of all sorts to be 
done was immense. And two centuries of 
facing the duties thus involved had bred in 
people and minister alike this habit of haste, 
to which Mrs. Knox did not readily adjust her- 
self after the far nienfe of Italian life. 

They sang another hymn, sitting this time. 
Why they sat Mrs. Knox did not know, nor 
did any one else. The nervous, quick, sad- 
looking minister opened the Bible while they 
sang, to And his text, as if he and they must 
not waste time. So soon as the hymn was 
ended he announced it, and addressed them. 

If she had hoped, from the simjAicity of the 
rest of the arrangements, that she was now to 
hear any frank statement of eternal truth, 
made with the freshness and vigor which had 
marked the addresses of the “rally” of the 
week before, she was sadly disappointed. Up 
till this moment the minister had been un- 
affected. He had read the Bible respectfully, 
thoughtfully, and naturally. He had some- 
times mistaken the sense, she had thought, but 


60 


SYBIL KNOX. 


lie was seeking for sense, and what be had 
found he had expressed. He was not like a 
priest she had once heard, who, reading from 
the book of Numbers, read, “The Lord said 
MOKEOVER, unto Moses,” as if moreover had 
been the oracle addressed to the great leader. 
But at the instant “the sermon” began all 
naturalness ceased, and the j)oor man entered 
on a function which he believed to be impor- 
tant, and which he had been taught by some 
one else to perform in a purely mechanical and 
almost unintelligent way. 

“Did you see me writing?” said John 
Furness, as they rode home. “I know the 
law of the instrument so well that, so soon as 
we came to the word ‘ Physical,’ I knew that 
the next head would be ‘ Mental,’ and the 
next ‘Spiritual.’ I thought it would amuse 
you if I jotted them down then and there on 
the paper. Here they are. Then I knew the 
second main head would be the man’s duty to 
himself^ and here it is. You know the poor 
things have to have three heads always, like 
Cerberus. I was out on the third head. If I 
had preached the sermon I would have said 


SYBIL KNOX. 


61 


something about God Himself, and His help in 
carrying on this affair. But he made that 
contrast between Death and Life instead. 
Still, you see I was right six times out of nine ; 
I mean 1 had two heads right, with three sub- 
divisions to each. Is not that almost up to 
Cuvier ? ”• 

She said that she had been comparing the 
functional character of the whole address with 
the vigor and life of the speeches she remem- 
bered at a “rally” to which, in old political 
days, her husband had taken her. “ It would 
be hard to say that this is because all this 
is specially religious. But what is the mat- 
ter?” 

“ Partly, I fancy, that this is full-dress, if 
you will let me say so. After all is said I 
doubt if the talk of a grand party is up to the 
talk of a hotel-piazza where the men are in 
their shooting-jackets and the w'omen in 
yachting-dresses. At church everybody is on 
his best behavior, and if you will have com- 
pany manners, why, you must have the dull- 
ness and dumbness which come with company 
manners,” But after a pause he added, “ I do 


62 


SYBIL KNOX. 


not tliink that is so much to blame as the 
seminaries and the newspapers.” 

“Seminaries?” 

“Yes. I never forgot what Dr. Wayland 
used to say of them. ‘ They give us excellent 
mediocrity. We no longer hear “ them is,” in 
the pulpit, or “ I be,” but, on the other hand, 
we no longer hear Edwards or Hopkins.’ ” 

“ It would be better, I suppose, if we did 
not look at our watches, and insist on thirty 
minutes precisely,” she persisted. “ Thank 
you ; I want to defend this good fellow. I do 
not know his name, but I do know that he 
speaks my language in my country. I have 
heard no other preacher for several years of 
whom I could say that. And I shall not be- 
lieve that the man is insincere ivho offered that 
prayer.” 

“It must be hard to make your doctrine 
come out precisely within so many seconds of 
last Sunday’s doctrine,” said he, in reply. 
“ St. Paul does not seem to have measured his 


letters so.” 


CHAPTER VI. 


RS. KNOX had not expected any visitors 



J..VJL Sunday, nor did she receive any, except 
two old friends of her mother, who lived .hard 
by, and who ran in each to see “how she was 
getting on.” Saturday had been assigned to 
hei;, in the general council of the neighborhood, 
“to get to rights,” and although one or two 
old family friends stopped in driving, and in- 
quired for her at the door, she had had no 
formal visits — no visit to be called a visit, but 
her brother’s. She had opened her relations 
with a good many of the people on whom she 
would be dependent for one and another mat- 
ter in the day’s supplies, and she had ex- 
changed gi’eetings with the nearest neighbors. 
She did not herself feel in the least “at rights,” 
or at home, though she tried to, still wrestling 
with herself, and, be it said seriously, with 
praj'er. But, alas ! every reminiscence of the 
house was of people wdio were now in another 


63 


64 


SYBIL KNOX. 


world. She welcomed her brother, when he 
came over on Saturday, and parted with him 
almost in tears on Monday morning, after they 
had both risen early, and she had given him 
his coffee and breakfast-bacon, before he drove 
to the train. Monday began for her at half- 
past six o’clock with the saddest sense of lone- 
liness. Yes, she w'ould have done better to 
fill the house with young people, as Mrs. 
Wildair had done with hers. Anything better 
than this houseful of ghosts, wdiom she almost 
heard and saw even in the daytime. 

But she need not have feared to be alone. 
She was on her knees on the floor, trying to 
make a refractory key govern a rusty lock, 
when she heard a step on the piazza, and a 
knock at the front door. But the knock did 
did not wait to be answ-ered, and he who 
knocked came immediately into the room, 
entered briskly, and with that air of confidence 
which the privileged man of a village is apt to 
show. 

“So glad to see you home, so glad to see 
you home. They said you were coming, but I 
didn’t believe it until you came,” 


SYBIL KNOX. 


65 


It was impossible for Mrs. Knox not to show 
some cordiality of manner, when she met so 
much. She was by no means a reserved per- 
son, and was willing to accept the great law of 
social order, which directs us to go a little 
more than half-way. One should sing C sharp, 
and not D flat ; one should not accejit the 
minor tones in life unless there be some visible 
and pressing reason. She did not offer both 
hands to Horace Fort, but she did not in any 
way snub him. She thought afterward that 
she should have snubbed him a little. But 
one cannot snub the Samoset or Squanto of the 
country, where one is a little afraid at land- 
ing, if Samoset or Squanto comes forward and 
says “Welcome, Englishmen ! ” Horace Fort 
had said, “ Welcome, O thou Italian, who 
hast appeared here so suddenly from Rome I ” 
And the Italian, eager to register herself as a 
Vermonter, welcomed him cordially. 

“You are hard at work, I see — hard at 
work. You will be, for weeks to come. It is 
not easy to translate one's self from continent 
to continent. I have come round to give my 
help. I do not say to offer it, because you will 


66 


SYBIL KNOX. 


have to accept it, whether you mean to or no. 
I shall ] ust look out and see how things are iu 
the stable, and if you need a man you must 
call me. . But tell me how they are on the 
other side. Tell me how you left your nieces, 
and why they are not with you.” 

And so they sank into the outside and 
formal discussion of the journey. She ex- 
plained about the first voyage, and the return 
to Queenstown, and the second voyage,- wish- 
ing all the time that Horace Fort would make 
himself of use, and not sit and use up her 
forenoon and her unpacking. Whether her 
manner showed it or not, after a lost half-hour 
she was well rid of him, and was permitted to 
return to her knees and her experiments on 
the key. In these experiments he might have 
helped her, but in the volubility of his offers 
of assistance, he had neglected to do so. 

This was, however, only an index, or, as the 
children say, a “ taste-cake,” of what was to 
happen all through the morning. Some of the 
visitors who came with offers of assistance 
rang the bell, and some did not. Some walked 
up into her own bedroom without being an- 


SYBIL KNOX. 


67 


nounced, and some did not. It was quite 
clear that she was the lion of the neighborhood 
for the day. Some of the neighbors wished to 
domesticate the lion and make her a useful 
member of society ; some of them wished to 
see the lion, as they might have gone to the 
Zoological Gardens. And thus, with one mo- 
tive or another, seven or eight people of the 
neighborhood came in.* One or two were old 
school friends of Mrs. Knox. One or two 
were newcomers in the village, who did not 
even know her by sight, but who wanted to 
extend hospitalities. Monday morning, in the 
duties of life, was not a convenient morning 
for the visits ; but the sense of the town had 
been that it would not seem kind to leave Mrs. 
Knox alone, now Sunday had gone by, without 
offers of assistance. It ought to be said in 
passing that even if these offers did annoy her 
a little at the moment, they were not only well 
meant but well planned. Almost each one of 
them was accompanied by an intimation that 
ice or butter or bread or poultry or milk or 
eggs, were at her service till her regular sup- 
plies were adjusted. Or, if she would like to 


68 


SYBIL KNOX. 


come over to dine, to sup, to breakfast, or to 
sleep, half the houses in the village were at 
her service. 

It was with one of the elder caciques of the 
village— or caciquesses, if there be female 
caciques — one who, to all appearance, might 
have been there when Champlain first came 
up the lake from the St. Lawrence, that Mrs. 
Knox was holding her own as well as she 
might, and discussing the social order of the 
years which had intervened since she left her 
home, when Horace Fort reappeared, after his 
explorations in the cellar, in the stable, in the 
barns. By this time he had accepted the law 
of a summer day, and made himself at home 
in his duties, so far that he had thrown off his 
coat and left it upon the clothes-line behind 
the house. He had in his hand a hammer with 
which he had been driving some nails in the 
barn-chamber, and so entered into the best 
parlor, where Sybil was entertaining her guest. 
He came in Avith the same indifferent habit of 
one at home which had annoyed Mrs. Knox 
on his first appearance, but, to give him his due, 
he was wholly unconscious that any stranger 


SYBIL KNOX. 


69 


was there. He was really trying to be of use, 
and, as his habit was, he forgot how many 
years had passed over him, since he and Sybil 
Furness were pupils in the academy together. 

“ I say, Sybil,” he said, “ there are two 
panes out in the back window in the barn- 
chamber, and I told Heman, that when he 
went over to the Crossing, he might take the 
measure and bring up the glass. I can show 
him how to set it.” 

He had advanced as far as this, in the eager- 
ness of his message, before he saw that Mrs. 
Edwards was glued against the wall behind the 
door, in the chair which she had selected for 
herself. Even his impertinence was a little 
dashed, while Mrs. Knox herself was towering 
with rage. Rightly or not, she did not choose 
to make a scene, by administering to him any 
rebuke. He had not meant any offence ; that 
was clear enough. He was taking airs upon him- 
self in managing her business ; that was clear 
enough. He had no right to call her Sybil ; 
to prove that would be easy. But she cer- 
tainly did not mean to begin her occupation of 
her new home by quarrelling with her neigh- 


70 


SYBIL KNOX. 


bors upon trifles. She saw that he wanted to 
get out of Mrs. Edwards’s way quite as quickly 
as she wanted to have him, so she simply 
said : 

“ Oh, Mr. Fort, I have quite as much as I can 
do to get this house into order. Do leave the 
barn and stables to take care of themselves.” 
And so she dismissed him. 

But Mrs. Edwards had taken in, or thought 
she had taken in, the whole position at a 
glance. If nobody else in the village recol- 
lected that long before Sybil Furness had ever 
seen Judge Knox, Horace Fort used to take her 
off on sleigh -rides and to dancing- parties, Mrs. 
Edwards remembered it. Mrs. Edwards re- 
membered similar things of Horace Fort’s 
mother and Sybil’s mother, not to say of the 
grandmothers and great-grandmothers of both, 
and so she departed with the satisfaction of 
having made a great observation— that some- 
thing was on again between Mrs. Knox and 
Horace Fort, for Horace Fort came into Mrs. 
Knox’s best parlor in his shirt-sleeves, and he 
called her “ Sybil” when he did so. 

Accordingly Mrs. Edwards occupied herself 


SYBIL KNOX. 


71 


for the rest of that week in going from one 
house to another, in the village and in the 
neighborhood, to repeat this observation, with 
such color as it gained from her imagination, or 
from the improvements wrought by her mem- 
ory, from day to day. 


CHAPTEE VII. 


I T was interesting to watch the delicate signs 
of the curiosity with which Bertha Berlitz 
and her little girl regarded their new home. 
Mrs. Knox had been a good deal disappointed, 
as they made the land of Long Island, that 
neither mother nor daughter had seemed to 
care anything about it. She had herself rushed 
from point to point of the vessel, Avherever any 
one saw anything or said he saw anything. 
But these two — a female Columbus, with her 
daughter, if only Columbus had had any daugh- 
ter — were wholly indifferent. It seemed as if 
they regarded the great ship as much more 
their home than any cloud-bank on the hori- 
zon could become. 

But now and here this first indifference gave 
way, slowly and coyly, but certainly. There 
was the air of condescension observable, as 
Mr. Lowell saj'^s so well, in all foreigners. But 
for all that, there was certainly curiosity. 

72 


SYBIL KNOX. 


73 


With Frau Berlitz herself, this was wholly 
second to that eager hope, always disappointed 
but never crushed, that every man whom she 
saw would prove to be her lost husband. With 
the little girl, there was the full sway of chil- 
dren’s infinite power of observation and eager- 
ness to see everything. Once at the Vermont 
home, the pigs and chickens and the mysteries 
of the stable and the barns introduced her to 
this “brave new world w'hich hath such won- 
ders in it.” In a long, set battle with the 
child’s mother, Mrs. Knox frightened her 
rather than persuaded her. She told her that 
she should not do what she wanted to do — 
namely, go from place to place through 
America, on foot, if possible, enquiring 
whether any one had seen Gerhard Berlitz. 
As far as could be seen, this had been the 
plan — not unlike the customs of mediaeval 
knighthood — with which the Frau had sailed 
for her new home. She was not deterred from 
it now, by any of the arguments which Mrs. 
Knox presented. But she gave way, partly 
from the necessity of things, partly under the 
sway of her gratitude to one who had been 


74 


SYBIL KNOX. 


more than kind to her in her wretched seasick- 
ness, and partly from the homage which she 
could not but render to one who clearly under- 
stood the position so much better than she did. 
She w’as glad, meanwhile, to be occupied. 
Sybil explained to the other women of her 
somewhat miscellaneous household, that the 
little girl was to be made generally useful ; and 
that Frau Berlitz herself would do some sewing 
which would be necessary, and help in the 
washing, while they were finding her husband, 
and while she was learning to speak English. 
A person who is to help in the washing is 
always popular in a New England household. 
A person who could be talked about in her 
own presence, without knowing what is said, is 
always a subject of interest; and so in a day Mrs. 
Knox found, to her satisfaction, that these new 
feudal retainers of hers were to be permitted 
to remain on a satisfactory footing in the estab- 
lishment. 

That day did not pass without her beginning 
on the search for Gerhard Berlitz — more doubt- 
ful, not to say more difficult, than Ponce de 
Leon’s search for the Fountain of Life. Judge 


SYBIL KNOX. 


75 


Kendrick’s advice was the basis of the whole 
line of operations. 

First of all, she wrote to Boston for the 
United States list of post-offices, a book which 
every postmaster must have, and which is a 
convenience, be it observed, in any private 
family. With less difficulty than she ex- 
pected, she interested Frau Berlitz in this cyclo- 
pedia of geographical knowledge. She showed 
her the alphabetical list of post-offices. She 
showed to her excited gaze the column which 
contains the names of Liberty, Liberty Centre, 
Liberty Corners, Liberty Falls, Liberty Fur- 
nace, Liberty Grove, Liberty Hall, Liberty 
Hills, Liberty Mills, Liberty Pole, Liberty 
Prairie, Liberty Ridge, Liberty Springs, Lib- 
erty Square, Liberty Town, and Libertyville. 
There the list ceased, and the one modest town 
of “Library,” in Allegheny County, Pennsyl- 
vania, took its place. 

Mrs. Knox then took Frau Berlitz into the 
hall, where was a large map of the United 
States, somewhat prehistorical, but large 
enough for the purpose. She showed to the 
newly-created American, who was quite intel- 


76 


SYBIL KNOX. 


ligent enougli to understand a map and its 
scale, liow small a portion of the map they 
had traversed in their journey from New York 
to the village where they were. Then, with 
some difBculty, she located Ouachita County, 
in Arkansas, and told her that one of the 
Libertys was there. She bade her imagine 
that the other fifty-one were scattered over the 
whole territory at distances not dissimilar from 
that which parted her from Ouachita. She 
told her, for the hundredth time, that they 
had no evidence that her husband was in either 
of these. She explained that if he were, or if 
he were not, he could be found out better by the 
post-office machinery than by any methods 
which the Frau could herself pursue, even if 
she had seven-leagued boots to travel with. 
Then as an earnest of her convictions, she en- 
closed a dollar bill in a letter written by her- 
self in German. In this letter she told Ger- 
hard where his wife and daughter were. She 
addressed this letter simply to Mr. Gerhard 
Berlitz, Liberty, put a stamp on it, and sent it 
to be mailed at the county town. She did not 
mail it at her own village office, because the 


SYBIL KNOX. 


77 


postmaster there would have sent it back to 
her. She told Frau Berlitz that this letter 
would eventually turn up at Washington, and 
that there, in the Dead Letter Office, were two 
or three accomplished women, whose business 
it would be to try one Liberty after another till 
they secured some answer. They would do 
this, because the dollar bill made this a “ val- 
uable” letter. 

Meanwhile, however, she took the shorter 
course of addressing herself directly to the de- 
partment or bureau, from which this informa- 
tion was to come. She wrote to this tracing 
bureau in the Dead Letter Office, and threw 
herself on the charity and kindness of the in- 
telligent women who direct it. She stated her 
case to them. She told them of the valuable 
letter which she had started on its way. And 
she asked them to teach her how to go to work 
in hunting up this broken straw, which had 
disappeared for the last twelve months from 
the surface of the ocean of American life. 


CHAPTEE VIII. 


VEEK passed in such cares and pleas- 



-i-A. ures as belong to bringing an abandoned 
house to order. It had its joys and it had its 
griefs. The house was in good enough repair. 
There was nothing serious for James Thor to 
see to when, in answer to a postal, he came 
over from Malden to survey the place. His 
grandfather had built it for Mrs. Knox’s 
grandfather. He had built it “ on honor,” 
probably without the assistance of any archi- 
tect. Still, there it was — comfortable, well- 
proportioned, and with a certain harmony and 
fitness about it which were the despair of the 
young architects who came on summer visits 
to Atherton, to play tennis, to catch trout, 
and, in general, to enjoy their holiday. The 
house was twice as large as any one would 
build now in the same place. Clearly, there 
had been no lack of timber, ‘ ‘ hard ’ ’ or 
“soft.’’ There were endless conveniences — 


78 


SYBIL KNOX. 


79 


some, which a ship-captain might have sug- 
gested. The wainscot of the parlors was per- 
fect, and queer little arches in them defined 
inexplicable alcoves. Sybil Knox was more 
than pleased that her memories had not de- 
ceived her. The house was wholly unlike the 
palace she had lived in in Rome, and three 
times as comfortable. 

After the week, and after Monday and Tues- 
day, she passed the ordeal of inspection by 
all her neighbors. The new people, in gen- 
eral, had not thought best to call. The old 
people, as has been said, had been ready, 
even prodigal, in their offers of service, and 
in their personal visits. By “ old people ” no 
one meant that these people were aged. Some 
of them Avere much younger than Mrs. Knox. 
Some of the “new people” were much older 
than they. The old people, in this sense, were 
those who descended from the people who 
came to Atherton when the first emigration 
was made from Essex a*id Worcester counties 
in Massachusetts. It was about a century be- 
fore the time Avhen Sybil Knox returned there. 
These people had created the town. In later 


80 


SYBIL KNOX. 


days, since the quarries were opened, since 
the railroad was built, and since the factories 
began, other people, known in village dialect 
as the new people, came in. They were just 
as good people, and as grand as the old people. 
They ranked on perfectly equal terms with 
them in the social hierarchy. But they had 
come since Sybil Knox left, and therefore 
none of them made these first visits of wel- 
come, excepting Mrs. Huntington, who had 
known her in Rome when she spent Easter 
there. 

It fell to the lot of Mrs. Carrigan to give the 
party in which Mrs. Knox was to be intro- 
duced again to her new and old neighbors. 
Mrs. Carrigan was one of the “ old people,” and 
they called each other Sybil and Ellen when 
they met, having, indeed, been born within 
six months of each other, having gone for 
raspberries and blackberries together, having 
studied their lessons from the same primer, 
and worked their way«along through life side 
by side, until almost the time when each was 
married. It might or might not have hap- 
pened that Mrs. Carrigan would have had the 


SYBIL KKOX. 


81 


sewing-society at her house on this particular 
Wednesday. But she was a person who could 
do much what she chose with the sewdng- 
society, and she thought, and thought rightly, 
that a meeting of that body, a little out of 
time, would be a favorable occasion for Sybil 
to meet new and old friends. 

The church was closed, so that no invitation 
could be given from the pulpit, and they thus 
lost that central place for news, which, in the 
arrangements of New England, frequently 
serves a convenient purpose. But a bended 
bow was sent round to all the nearer members 
of the sewing-society, they were requested to 
communicate the information to those whom 
they loved, and these in turn communicated it 
to those who loved them. So, in fact, nobody 
was uninvited, though nobody knew how any- 
body was invited. 

The sewing-society alw^ays met at two in the 
afternoon. They sewed or knit or wound yarn 
until six. Then a high tea was served. In the 
evening somebody read a paper, and by eight 
or nine o’clock the people went home. 

The day proved to be a lovely day in June. 


82 


STBIL KNOX. 


Mrs. Knox sent over for Ellen, to consult her 
as to the costume in which she should appear. 
She had heard, through some ill-natured 
friend, that she would find it impossible to suit 
the neighborhood. If she went in a dress 
which showed any state it would be said by 
somebody, or so she was told, that “Mrs. 
Knox was trying to show off her grandeur to 
poor people.” If, on the other hand, she went 
attired as she would have been in her own 
hoiise of an afternoon, it would be said that 
“Mrs. Knox didn’t think that Atherton people 
were worth dressing up for.” 

Mrs. Carrigan showed a little displeasure at 
Sybil Knox’s question. “My dear,” said she, 
“I do not believe that we are any bigger fools 
than people are in Rome or in Washington. 
Come as you like.” 

And when Mrs. Knox laid out upon the bed 
a perfectly new dress from a Parisian dress- 
maker, of a thin, white woollen stuff, her 
hostess said it would do perfectly well. She 
did not believe any one would think it w’as too 
grand, or that any one else would think it too 
simple. She was sure it was very pretty, and 


SYBIL KNOX. 


83 


she wished she had just such a dress herself. 
So Mrs. Knox went clad in the nun’s veiling. 

As it happened, nobody else was clad in 
nun’s veiling. Every variety of costume 
showed itself, but hers was a i^retty dress and 
the dressmaker had fitted it well, and Atherton 
was by no means above rejoicing in an oppor- 
tunity to study the last devices of Paris. 

Perhaps not a single person in the room un- 
derstood with how much feeling Sybil Knox 
came into that company. Really, she felt 
that she was on trial, that Atherton was on 
trial. She almost felt that it would be deter- 
mined before six hours went by whether she 
had or had not made the great mistake of 
her life in coming back to her father’s home. 
In truth, she overstated all this. Any such 
supposition that life hinges on a single moment 
is apt to be morbid. In truth, if, after six 
months, she had found that her experiment 
was an unfortunate one, there was no act of 
Parliament or of Congress prohibiting her from 
going away to the Samoan Islands, or to Yoko- 
hama, or to Timbuctoo, or to Paris, or to any 
other capital. But she was still so young that 


84 


SYBIL KNOX. 


she had still a great deal of that gospel taught 
in poor novels, which makes people think that 
a single decision generally determines abso- 
lutely the conditions of their lives. 

It was delightful to meet with the “old 
people.” Some of them were as cross as they 
were in the old days, but, on the whole, most 
of them were more good-natured even than she 
had exjjected. Some of them were very shy ; 
some of them were terribly undemonstrative, 
and managed to greet her as if she had been 
away from church for a single Sunday ; some 
were very proud, and- were afraid to express the 
interest that they felt in the arrival of a person 
who had not been in America for ten years ; 
some of them gushed, alas, for in all circles 
there are a few people who will gush. But, 
on the whole, Sybil Knox found herself well 
received. She was well pleased with herself 
that she remembered so many as she did. In 
the cases of her worst mistakes they were 
made with persons who were good-natured, 
and had not expected their personality to 
assert itself absolutely in all conditions. 

Then, for the “new people,” Sybil Knox 


SYBIL KNOX. 


85 


had just enough of the pride of being herself 
one of the “old people” to get along very 
well with them. She did not know the dis- 
tinctions which they brought with them from 
their old homes, she did not know who their 
fathers and mothers were, she did not know 
whose husbands had been to college, and she 
did not care. She took, unconsciously — and 
perhaps it was as well that she did — the posi- 
tion of being one of the old people, and found 
herself, somewhat to her amusement, welcom- 
ing to the town persons who knew it a great 
deal better than she did. - It was impossible 
for her, after a little, not to feel that she was 
quite at home, and that she had a certain duty 
about making Mrs. A. or Mrs. B. or Mrs. C. un- 
derstand Atherton as well as she did. 

As it happened again, they got launched 
upon a discussion of this matter of gossip, 
which had been forced upon her, as the reader 
knows, more than once as she was considering 
her plan of returning to her father’s house. 
The worst threat which had been made was 
that she would find the littleness of village life 
absolutely insufferable. She had boldly said 


86 


STBIL KNOX 


once and again that she could not hear worse 
gossip than she had heard in palaces in Rome, 
and then she had been told once and again 
that she must not say so till she had tried it. 
She had been told that she could not tell how 
well she could stand it till she had been ex- 
posed to this sort of mosquito-bite day in and 
out, week in and out, month in and out, for 
year after year. This thing had been said to 
her with so much earnestness, that she was 
well aware that she had become morbid about 
it, and of course she had read enough about 
the necessary relation between tea and gossip 
to suppose that, at a great tea-party like this, 
she and the mosquitoes would be in the closest 
conceivable relations. Whoever heard of a 
sewing-circle that was not a nest of gossipers ? 

She reported for duty, and had her choice 
given her between work on flannel and work on 
cotton, work with knitting-needles and work 
at crochet. She made her selection and Joined 
herself to a little circle of old school-friends 
who sat around a little straw table, on which 
were their work-boxes and other bits of 
machinery. There were perhaps half a dozen 


SYBIL KNOX. 


87 


such, groups, ill different parts of the large 
parlor in which they were, while some of the 
young people were out on the piazzas, and 
others were congregated in a room on the 
other side of the entry. The whole jiarty con- 
sisted of fifty or sixty people, of all ages from 
sixteen to six-and-eighty. 

Sybil and her friends were soon talking of 
just the things that they were talking of 
before she was married, and she fairly forgot 
the terrors with which she had gone into the 
house, as she found that the talk of five or six 
old school-mates was very much the same 
when they were twenty-six years old as when 
they were seventeen. More was said about 
babies than would have been said then, but 
there was the same comradeship, there was 
that pleasantness which always comes where 
people use their first names in talk, and there 
was no lack of subjects for discussion. 

All of a sudden, however, she heard the 
sharp cling of a bell, and then a burst of 
laughter through the whole room. She looked 
up with surprise, and the friends around her 
laughed perhaps more heartily than any one 


88 


SYBIL KNOX. 


else, when they saw how little she understood 
what they were laughing at. Then it was 
explained to her. 

It proved that two or three years before, at 
some season when it had been necessary to 
revive the sewing-society from some gulf into 
which it had fallen ; on occasion of a new or- 
ganization and a new constitution, the most 
stringent rules had been adopted for the check 
of this same gossiping of which Sybil Knox 
had been forewarned. It had been determined 
in solemn conclave that, whatever people 
talked about anywhere else, at the sewing- 
society their conversation must be restricted. 
It had been voted that no person should say 
anything to the disadvantage of any person in 
that county, while the society was engaged at 
its monthly meeting. If any person did say 
anything to the disadvantage of another person 
in the county, that i)erson w'as to be fined five 
cents, to go toward the purchasing fund of the 
society. For the collection of these fines there 
were owned by the society fifteen little money- 
boxes made in imitation of barrels. These 
boxes are generally used for missionary funds. 


SYBIL KNOX. 


89 


but in the present case they were used simply 
for gossip-fines. There was no judge or jury 
who awarded these fines ; the conscience of the 
offender was relied ux)on, if her attention was 
fairly called to the question. So soon as she 
had decided against herself she must rise and 
walk to the nearest box and put her five cents 
in, and it was said that no- person ever went 
to the society without a few nickels in her 
pocket in case she should transgress the rule, 
which was now one of the fundamental rules 
of the constitution. In the present case it 
proved that a certain pretty Blanche Wilder- 
spin had been the culprit. She was one of those 
jolly, bright girls, universal favorites, because 
they live with all their might, and are not 
thinking of themselves. Her exuberant glee 
had run away with her. 

‘‘You never heard of such things, and you 
never saw such a party — or such a set of 
parties. Why, the President of the Grand 
Panjandrum was there,, and the fireman on our 
train was there, and I saw a very nice black 
man, who was either a waiter without an 
apron or the night porter on the New York 


90 


SYBIL KNOX. 


train. And just as tliey were all wondering 
whether they would have ‘ a few remarks ’ on 
the book of Ezra, or would let the Grand 
Panjandrum waltz with poor me, in came Lady 
Spitzka, I call her — she is the wife of the Arcade 
man or of the Howe Railroad man, I do not 
know which. She had diamonds on her hands 
and diamonds in her ears and diamonds on her 
neck and diamonds on her breast, and where 
there were no diamonds there was onyx and 
jasper and chalcedony, and all the beautiful 
things in the book of Revelation. 

“ I really thought the Four Beasts would 
come in next. Oh ! we were very swell, I tell 
you. I saw in two seconds that I had no 
chance of waltzing with the Grand Panjan- 
drum. He left me with his wife to pay his 
court to the Lady of Golconda, and he 
said: 

‘“I am so glad you came. It is a pleasant 
evening.’ 

“ ‘Wall, yes,’ she said. ‘I says to dad — you 
know the boys calls him dad — says I, ‘ ‘ Had, 
et’s not goin’. to rain,” says I,’ ” 

And when the bright story-teller had come 


SYBIL KNOX. 


91 


as far as this, she saw a twinkle in Huldah 
Wadsworth’s eyes, and she stopped herself. 

‘ ‘ P ure gossip, ’ ’ she said, ‘ ‘ and in the county, 
too.” So was it that she resolutely stopped 
the story. “ I had better bite my tongue out 
and be well done with it.” And then, with a 
good stage walk, she crossed the room, put a 
nickel in the nearest barrel, and struck the 
signal-bell. 

As she came back to her seat she said, 
“Jane, what was that you were telling us about 
cumuli ?” And all the girls laughed again. 

Some of this was explained to Mrs. Knox, 
and for the rest she guessed it out. “The 
rule works well just now,” said Mrs. Carrigan, 
“ and will till we forget it. It makes us give 
a little too much time to analyzing talk, and 
finding out what gossip is.” 

“As I told you,” said Mrs. Knox, “every 
human being warned me against the terrors of 
it.” 

“ I do not think they talked much gossip 
when they came to sew for the soldiers.” 

“ No,” said Jane Grey, shuddering. “ Some 
body sat and read about capital operations. 


92 


SYBIL KNOX 


and the need of ether, ^ and the terrors of the 
dead line.” 

“Well,” said Mrs. Carrigan, “I do not 
think they talk gossip at the Chautauqua 
Circle.” 

“No, indeed. You know Dr. Primrose’s 
story. An excellent old lady took him aside 
for a private conference. Dear old man, he 
thought she was anxious about the state of 
her soul. When they were alone she said, 
‘Doctor, what do you think was the most 
important result produced in Europe by the 
capture of Constantinople by the Turks ? ’ ” 


CHAPTER IX. 


L et us hope that the reader has not for- 
gotten Mr. John Coudert, who talked 
quite seriously with Mrs. Sybil Knox in that 
other palace in Rome ; for John Coudert had 
not forgotten Mrs. Knox, and, when her life in 
Europe was over, it was not very long before 
he found that his business in Europe was over 
for the time. Men like him do not count the 
passage across as the obstruction which it 
seems to gentle people like this reader, who 
has never tried the experiment, or tried it but 
twice, and with a certain difficulty. John 
Coudert readily persuaded himself that it was 
necessary that he should be in America again, 
as he had before persuaded himself that it 
was necessary that he should be in Rome. 
But he was not a fool, and, having at heart a 
matter which was lifelong, he did not believe 
that he could achieve his purpose by any sud- 
den dash. He had not any very high estimate 


94 


SYBIL KNOX. 


of his own value ; had he been more conceited 
he would have been more rash. Not thinking 
of himself more highly than he ought to think, 
he did not, at the moment of his arrival in New 
York, follow Mrs. Knox to Atherton to ingra- 
tiate himself with her in the fancies or occupa- 
tion of summer life. Indeed, he had matters 
of importance *to attend to in America ; he 
was glad to be on the same side of the ocean 
with a person of whom he thought so often, 
and he knew that the chances were better that 
he should hear of that person in America' than 
if he must be looking out for her name in the 
columns of Galignani’s, or must be leading up 
to Vei’mont and Atherton in the conversation 
of the Beau Rivage. 

Fortune favors the judicious. On the first 
morning after his landing it was his business 
to go to the New York office of Judge Ken- 
drick, whose promptness we saw in that matter 
of crossing the ocean. John Coudert was to go 
at once to the W est, to get what a good na- 
tional phrase calls “the bottom facts” with 
regard to a certain railroad corporation, which 
either had been “wrecked,” would be 


SYBIL KNOX. 


95 


“wrecked,” or might be “wrecked,” to meet 
the plans of the avarice of a certain local mag- 
nate. John Coudert was the trustee of many 
people whose incomes depended on the suc- 
cess of this railroad and the steadiness of its 
business, and he did not propose to see their 
property ruined — or, indeed, his own, which 
was in the same securities — for want of some 
personal information better than what he 
could obtain by the reports which were per- 
mitted to be printed for the benefit of the 
stock market. Judge Kendrick had been an 
old personal friend, and often his adviser in 
business affairs, and Coudert therefore went 
up to ask him how the truth was to be found 
in the matter of the wreckage, and if there 
were anything that an honest man could do, in 
order that the ruin which was so coolly pro- 
posed might be averted. 

Perhaps it is as well to stop for a moment 
to tell the unwary reader what it is to wreck a 
railroad. It by no means supposes that the 
wrecker is going out with heavy sleepers or 
stones to lay them upon the track and throw a 
train into the abyss. This is to wreck a train. 


96 


SYBIL KNOX. 


but not to wreck a railway, whick crime, for 
dastardly meanness, is, perhaps, the more 
atrocious of the two. The rascal who proposes 
to wreck a railway secures for himself in its 
management a position so far confidential that 
his word is relied upon, and that all men who 
have anything to do with it suppose that he is 
managing it for the best. He pretends to man- 
age it for the best. He has a certain flamboy- 
ant way of doing business, as if he were thor- 
oughly skilled in such affairs, and were going 
to lift this particular road into dignity and 
success which it had never attained before. 
But meanwhile he takes his own measures so 
that this probable success shall not be gained. 
It is quite in his power, from his position in 
the management, to see that freight does not 
go over the road which it should go over, that 
passengers do not go over it who should go ; 
it is even in his power to see that the returns 
of receipts are not properly made at headquar- 
ters, and, indeed, when the time comes for a 
semi-annual or an annual report, there are a 
thousand ways in which such a report can be 
made, and it is in his power so to bring for- 


SYBIL KNOX. 


97 


ward the figures that, to the horror of all 
people concerned, it shall appear that the road 
is running backward. Perhaps his whole ob- 
ject will be attained if the stock falls several 
points in the market ; he may be satisfied by 
buying in when the stock is low, then by pub- 
lishing another set of reports, and cai’rying 
out such an exaggerated statement of its 
value, that, at the end of a few weeks, 
he can sell the same stock at a large advance. 
Fortunate, indeed, for the people who have 
placed their funds in that railroad, if he 
is satisfied with such enterprises as this. 

But perhaps he seeks larger game. Per- 
haps he is determined that he will himself 
become the manager of this whole property, 
and is not satisfied until he have made the 
property bankrupt and compelled somebody, 
perhaps the indignant public, to ask that it all 
maybe transferred into the hands of a receiver 
who shall carry it on where the stockholders 
have failed. In this case all such people as 
those whom John Coudert represented, who 
have placed their money in the railroad in good 
faith, find that they have lost everything which 


98 


SYBIL KNOX. 


they had. But the man who has wrecked the 
railroad for thme takes an early occasion to be 
present when this worthless projierty is sold 
under the hammer, becomes the proprietor of 
what is called a controlling interest in some new 
concern, and Just as likely as not, he is praised 
for being the intelligent and active manager 
who knew how to take care of a ruined prop- 
erty and carrj' it forward to success. It was 
precisely one of these schemes by which an 
honest, well-to-do railroad was to be wrecked 
for the benefit of a sharper, that John Cou- 
dert had determined to counteract if he could. 
That he might counteract it he had gone in to 
see his friend, J udge Kendrick. 

Judge Kendrick still had an ofiice in New 
York, though his legal residence was in Wis- 
consin. He heard his friend’s story with even 
more interest than John Coudert expected. 
As soon as the story was done he said in reply ; 
“ I am more interested in this than you think, 
for a near friend of ours, I have a right to call 
her now — she crossed the ocean with us — has a 
large investment in this Cattai’augus and Ope- 
lousas. It is only three days since I found 


SYBIL KNOX. 


99 


this nastiness was brewing, and I have been 
wondering what could be done about it. I 
shall be glad to help to the very last, and I 
can call upon Eobert and Horace, and our old 
friends, and Flanders will be interested as well. 
But what we must have is a reliable and decent 
X)erson — just such a person as yourself— to go 
out to Franklin, place himself at the centre of 
affairs, and find out what is what, that we may 
know what we are to do.” 

Coudert, of course, was pleased to find he 
had so vigorous an ally, and asked, not un- 
naturally, who was the travelling friend. And 
it required more than his old steadfastness of 
training to keep the blood from flashing into 
his face, when Judge Kendrick said that this 
innocent shareholder, who was to be ruined, 
was no other person than our friend Mrs. 
Knox. Naturally enough, he told the story 
of their adventure, told how pluckily •she 
took her place with the second class, and then 
spoke of the romance of the German woman, 
her child, and the lost husband. 

To his surprise, now, John Coudert took 
much more interest in this detail than he could 


100 


SYBIL KNOX. 


have imagined possible ; but then, Coudert 
was always looking out for an adventure. He 
saw at once that the fortunes of the Berlitzes 
were of much more interest for the moment 
than was the danger of the C. & O. He told 
the story in the evening to his wife as an illus- 
tration of how a man like Coudert found 
romance in everything, and wanted to push an 
adventure to the end. 

Coudert was not satisfied till he knew every- 
thing that there was to know about the Ber- 
litz family. In fact. Judge Kendrick knew 
this detail quite as well as he cared to, for he 
had himself been so much interested in the 
matter that he had copied all the names upon 
his own note-book, and had made such in- 
quiries as occurred to an ordinary working 
lawyer as being enough to make. That is to 
say, he had put into the Allgemeine Zeitung 
an Advertisement saying that if Gerhard Berlitz 
would inquire at his office he would hear of 
something to his advantage. His own office 
clerks wished that Gerhard Berlitz had never 
been born, so many of that name had already 
reported, expecting to receive ingots of gold. 


SYBIL KKOX. 


101 


who had no wives in other countries, and no 
daughters, and who were much disgusted when 
they learned that all that was to their advan- 
tage was the arrival of a penniless woman 
with her child. But John Coudert was raven- 
ous for details. He heard all these stories of 
failure with utter indifference. He laughed at 
Kendrick for not having gone to work more 
sensibly. He devoted a couple of pages of his 
own note-book to the facts which were known. 
He said he did not doubt that he should 
stumble upon the proper Liberty, and that he 
should bring home the lost husband in triumph. 

‘‘ If only ‘ the other woman ’ has not carried 
him off and changed his name.” 

In reply to this cynical sneer John Coudert 
only laughed. He said that Kendrick was 
always a pessimist, and Wanted to have the 
worst come out. ‘^I, on the other hand, am 
an optimist. I believe in my own race. 
Especially I believe in my own sex. And you 
shall see that I will bring back this honest 
workman — not rich, indeed ; I do not expect 
that — but virtuous, and hajjpy in the prospect 
of seeing his Bertha and his child.” 


102 


SYBIL KNOX 


And so they parted, John Coudert more 
willing than ever to give up the present plea- 
sure of a visit to Atherton, because he had 
now the chance which might show to Sybil 
Knox that he was more than she had ever seen 
him. He did not suppose he had been very 
successful in the tournaments of the piazza at 
the Beau Kivage, or in the conversations, how- 
ever serious, of one or another palazzoin Rome. 
He did not pride himself particularly on his 
success in conversation, and he did not choose 
to have this woman regard him simply as an 
American who was fooling away his time in 
European travel, if he could show her, by such 
a success as would be involved in bringing 
home Gerhard Berlitz in triumph, that he had 
some sense and some determination. In that 
event he thought he should score one in the 
rather difficult siege which he was pressing 
forward. Still more he knew, should he score 
a point worth scoring, if, in one of the tourna- 
ments of modern life, in a real shock of arms 
against this Brian de Bois Guilbert, who was 
proposing the ruin of thousands of share- 
holders, there was such an opportunity as the 


SYBIL KNOX. 


103 


knights of old time did not know, to recom- 
mend themselves to the ladies of their love. 

With a little new wonder, not irreverent, be 
it said, at the ^‘fine connections and nice 
dependencies” which had revealed to him this 
Berlitz business, John Coudert went across to 
the particular clerk who, only five minutes 
before, had been interviewing a man who, he 
declared, was the seventeenth Berlitz already. 
He was outraged at the philanthropies of his 
chief, and amazed that a man as intelligent as 
Coudert cared one straw. Glad enough he was 
to give up this quest into his hands, and took 
with eagerness the memorandum of the New 
York office where Mr. Coudert’ s clerk would 
take the whole set of the Berlitzes in charge. 
‘‘ You will have to endow a hospital for them, 
or a House of Correction,” he said, as he 
gladly gave up the file of papers. 

And Coudert himself, far from spending that 
afternoon or the next day in the palaces of 
railroad magnates, to determine what could be 
done, or w^hat could not, with the C. & O., 
and with the wreckers, took the West Shore 
Railway to a quiet little way-station. Here he 


104 


SYBIL KNOX. 


found an old Dutcli village, which in ten years 
had hardly found out what a railroad is, or 
what a time-table means. From house to 
house, from doctor to minister he went, to 
inquire about Gerhard the lost, and what had 
been known of the “honestest, most steady 
fellow that ever lived.” This was the general 
verdict, and as Coudert returned to New York 
it was with a certain sense of a mysterious con- 
nection between his own life and that of this 
lost waif. What is it Fichte says ? Coudert 
wrote it in the calendar he was making. 

“But I know not thee. Thou knowest not 
me. What is time ? How certain it is that, as 
infinite ages pass away, I shall meet thee, thou 
wilt meet me, as each to each renders some 
needed service in the infinite interchanges of 
eternal love.” 

And having written this he wound his watch 
and went to bed. “All the same,” he said 
aloud, “all the same. Brother Fichte, if you 
please, the good God and I will hurry up the 
infinite ages. What is time ? ” 


CHAPTER X. 


J OHN COUDERT went on his Western trav- 
els with much more heart after he had seen 
people who had seen Gerhard Berlitz. He was 
surprised to find how his interest in this man 
had grown. He had before heard nothing but 
good of him ; that was well. But now he was 
sure of his personal existence ; he was no 
longer a myth of the post-office— that was bet- 
ter. From the good Dutch woman in whose 
house the errant gardener had boarded Coudert 
had obtained a photograph of his face, which 
he had left as a sort of keepsake, but which 
she readily exchanged for a half-dollar. Cou- 
dert did even come round to belong to the 
party who did not believe in the “other 
woman.” He did not yet belong to the party 
of two who were sure that Berlitz was alive. 
But clearly he had been alive when this photo- 
graph was taken. 

What he learned of Berlitz interested him 

*05 


106 


SYBIL KNOX. 


He had always seemed happy when a letter 
came from his wife. He never drank, and 
spent neither time nor money at the grocery, 
which was the drinking-place of the village. 
From some whim, which no one understood, 
he had soon given up that first plan of learning 
English. “ German was good enough for him ; 
there were enough Germans everywhere.” 
The good Frau, with whom Coudert talked, 
thought he ivas a little cracked about this, but 
in truth her own English was of the poorest. 

She wondered why the photograph, rep- 
resenting him in his best clothes, was of any 
value, till Mr. Coudert dropped the hint that 
he might see Frau Berlitz. Then she yielded 
gracefully to the silver arguments he offered. 

Somewhat the same experience renewed 
itself at Rochester, where, by good fortune, it 
was necessary for him to stop to make inquiries 
as to the C. & O. Railroad. Not that the 
reader need take the map of New York to find 
the route of that railroad. Has not the W estern 
Union telegraph lines in Southern Florida? 
And the West End of Boston runs its cars in 
Southern Dorchester. "Whatever the hopes of 


SYBIL KNOX. 


107 


the founders of the C. & O. may have been, it has 
never yet reached Opelousas, nor has any train 
on it ever departed from Cattaraugus. It was 
seized by the locks, when it was drowning, by 
a brave young man, who hauled it above the 
flood, some thirty years ago, and compelled 
it to do good service in uniting a Northern and 
a Southern system of transportation. A meas- 
ure of signal humanity, begun by him, first 
called attention to it ; and afterwards the 
honesty of its legitimate work — a sort of 
“ twenty-five-cents-to-the-quarter ” quality — 
kept its stock well above par. The Northern 
system with which it was connected sometimes 
tried to buy it. The Southern system often 
pretended to try. But, in reality, it had been 
an independent company — a sort of brave little 
Switzerland between the Germany and France 
of railroad-dom, till the drama of this year 
began. And now John Coudert was its 
William Tell. 

About the wicked Gessler, who was to work 
its ruin, he learned things at Rochester which 
amazed him, even after what he knew already. 
He made an appointment there, with some large 


108 


SYBIL KNOX. 


stockholders, for the next day, and then, 
leaving the attraction of one of the best public 
galleries of art in America, he went out of the 
city to hunt up traces of Gerhard Berlitz. 
Another portrait — this time a full-length min- 
iature — and new anecdotes of his steadfast 
probity, and of his occasional eccentricity, 
repaid this enterprise. 

All of fact that Coudert really learned was 
that the nursery -man with whom Berlitz went 
West, the year before, seemed a very decent 
sort of person, and that Gerhard Berlitz, with 
a sort of infatuation, perhaps homesickness, 
had never learned ten words of English. He 
had always kept in “Dutch company.” 

As to the wrecking of the Cattaraugus and 
Opelousas, the more John Coudert learned the 
more serious did he feel the adventure on 
which he had committed himself. Most fortu- 
nate, indeed, was it that Judge Kendrick had 
maintained his connection in New York, so that, 
in the office where he made his quarters there, 
they could watch the New York end of the 
devices of thu enemy, while, at the West, it 
was possible, perhaps, to meet them. Coudert 


SYBIL KNOX. 


109 


was in correspondence with both ends of the 
line. The gentlemen whom he met in Roch- 
ester were in despair. They knew, by old 
experience, the force and craft of the enemy 
he was now first studying. , “ When you know 
this man better, Mr. Coudert, you will let him 
alone.” “ Mr. Coudert, you need a long spoon 
if you sup with the devil.” “Do not throw 
good money after bad, Mr. Coudert. I had 
fifty thousand in the C. &. O., and I bade my 
bookkeeper sell and charge it off last January. 
I will not deal with such a knave.” 

But the more men said such things to John 
Coudert, the more he said that somebody must 
do something. He had begun because he had 
his sisters to protect. Then he had found that 
he had his Alma Mater to protect. The Martin 
Pinzon University, where he was educated, 
had two hundred thousand dollars in this 
C. & O. stock. Then, to his dismay, when he 
got hold of the stock-list, which Judge Ken- 
drick’s old partner in New York had secured, 
he found that Mrs. Knox was in almost as 
deep as the Martin Pinzon University. If 
there was justice in America, he would not 


110 


SYBIL KNOX 


stand that. He had asked Judge Kendrick, 
before he went to Wisconsin, to see if she had 
in any way secured herself, and to let him 
know. And, with this triple responsibility, he 
went westward, to receive at once the cold 
water which the best men in Rochester now 
threw upon his enterprise. 

The most crafty speculator in the older 
West was determined that the C. & O. stock 
should be ruined in the market, and had well- 
nigh succeeded. 

Here was a stock which Coudert had himself 
commended to his sisters, and to friends in 
Europe, only two years ago. It stood then a 
solid, well-established enterprise, working on 
perfectly legitimate lines, without a real rival. 
The stock sold at one hundred and thirteen 
easily, even when the market wavered for 
other securities. This was hardly two years 
ago. But now, for twenty months, this stock 
had steadily fallen. There had been no visible 
attack on it; there had been no unfriendly 
legislation; there had been no “hated rival.” 
But, every month, it had dragged on the mar- 
ket when it was offered for sale. At the end 


SYBIL KNOX. 


Ill 


of each month the quotation would be lower, 
by three or four points, than at the beginning. 
And now it had passed two dividends ; it was 
said it had not earned the next. It was quoted 
at thirty-three to thirty-four, and the offer of 
any large quantity brought it down to a lower 
figure. And if you asked the shrewdest and 
most intelligent men in the market what was 
the reason for this decline they shook their 
heads and said that nobody knew. But they 
added that the greatest rascal who went un- 
hanged in our time, wanted to have that stock 
fall, and that it would fall till he wanted to 
make it rise. 

John Coudert made it his first business to 
find out what were the tactics of his enemy. 
He went to the reading-room of the Young 
Men’s Christian Association in Rochester, and 
introduced himself as president of the society 
in Wentworth. He made himself at home 
there for a week, receiving his niail and writing 
his letters there. He burroj|ed in their old 
files without saying why. No one asked any 
questions, and he consulted nobody. 

In these studies he made it his business to 


112 


SYBIL KNOX. 


read the money articles in the Pinzon Ad- 
vocate and the Functionary. Pinzon and 
Function, as this reader ought to know, are 
the two points between which the C. & 0. now 
runs, awaiting that completion which has been 
referred to, between Cattaraugus on the one 
hand and Opelousas on the other. 

If you have ever seen the Pinzon Advocate 
and the Functionary you know that they are 
printed in close imitation of the London Times., 
probably because the circumstances and needs 
of their readers are absolutely unlike those of 
the readers of that journal. It is therefore 
necessary, for instance, that each journal shall 
have a daily article on the money-market, and 
four leading editorials, in leaded bourgeois 
type, because the London Times has. 

Mr. Coudert engaged himself for a week in 
the reading-room, in studying these money 
articles for two years back. He was thus en- 
abled to fix the days when his new arch-enemy 
had called at the^offices of the gentlemen who 
wrote these articles, and had offered each of 
them enough passes, thousand-mile tickets, or 
what-not to make it “worth while” for him 


SYBIL KNOX. 


113 


to represent the C. & 0. as unfavorably as 
possible. It was clear enough, also, that 
neither of these intelligent gentlemen had any 
acquaintance or correspondence with the other. 
What one said often contradicted what the 
other said. But, all the same, the general im- 
pression was given by each that the C. & O. 
was playing a losing game. 

Each journal, up to the fatal July 11, or July 
12, which Mr. Coudert took note of, had been 
eager in extolling the management of the 
curiously well-regulated corj)oration. After 
these dates, however, each journal, without 
once alluding to its former convictions, had 
detected gross rottenness in its affairs. 

After the study of these two years of history 
Mr. Coudert visited Pinzon. He had not been 
there since he graduated, and he was glad, he 
said, to be there as Commencement came on. 
He appeared in time to hear the president’s 
baccalaureate sermon. He gladly accepted 
his old chum Professor Stillman’s invitation to 
his house, and he stayed till the last guest 
had left after the Delta Chi Sigma Conven- 
tion, even after the last mother had left who 


114 


SYBIL KNOX. 


was furnishing the room of her freshman 
son. 

It was so pleasant to see how John Coudert 
kept up his love for the collegeo 

Alas ! If the truth were told, John Coudert 
was not all the time in the Delta Chi reading- 
room, or looking over the old census reports in 
the college library. He was in the counting- 
room of George Miller, the old founder of the 
town. Or he was sitting smoking with the com- 
mercial travelers at the Hotel Pinzon. He 
made acquaintance, by remembering one of his 
old flames, with the family of Converse, the 
head of the freight-yard. He gave a supper 
party one night to a commercial traveller, whom 
he had met just once in Duluth, and asked him 
to bring in a half-dozen of the best business men 
he dealt with. 

The pretence was that it was desirable to 
interest these men of affairs more in the college. 
But, before the evening was half over, the whole 
company was talking C. & O. politics, not to 
say C. & O. sociology. And so, when John 
Coudert bade his friends good-night, when the 
friendly Duluth drummer shook hands last of 


SYBIL KNOX. 


116 


all and parted, the two laughed, and Philbrick 
said, “ Well, Mr. Coudert, I think what you do 
not know of your railroad now is not w'orth 
knowing.” 

The middle of that critical July seemed to 
have brought with it events more fatal to the C. 
& O. than the changed tone of the newspapers. 
At that time there had been two most ex- 
pensive wrecks of freight-trains, which were 
directly traceable to the neglect of a drunken 
car-inspector, who, Coudert found, had never 
been drunk before ; and who, on his discharge, 
was “taken care of” by a railroad controlled 
by the arch-enemy. At about the same time 
the C. & 0. lost practically all its grain- trade 
and most of its coal-trade. It had turned out 
afterward that this was from high rates quoted 
in error by a confidential clerk, who had sud- 
denly left the road the next month. Coudert 
feared that he had no evidence that would pass 
a court of law, but his eyes were being opened 
to the tactics he must guard against. 


CHAPTER XI. 


S YBIL KNOX was always haunted with the 
dread of the “mild police” of a small 
country town. Prom the moment when she 
had said she was to live in her father’s home, 
her worldly acquaintances, and, indeed, many 
of those who lived in the Kingdom of Heaven, 
were putting her on her guard on the terrible 
restrictions of the Liliputian cordage with 
which, in such a home, she was bound. She 
was, therefore, specially interested when she 
found at the sewing-society that its chiefs were 
awake to their danger. And specially was she 
pleased with this nice, hearty Blanche Wilder- 
spin, who had so loyally lent herself to the 
cause of' order and good sense, and who 
brought so much life and humor into the whole 
concern. 

. Mrs. Knox, therefore, took an early oppor- 
tunity to ask Miss Blanche to come up to the 
house to tea, and, in a quiet way, arranged 
116 


SYBIL KNCX. 


117 


that she should suggest her own company. 
The other girls were glad of the chance to see 
the newly-opened house, and Mrs. Knox’s 
pictures and other pretty things. And so, 
when the day came, she found herself the 
centre of a jolly circle, who thought her a hun- 
dred years older than she was, but who seemed 
to her but very little younger than herself. 
How soon, in their lives, would they take on 
the dust, the bit of crape, the sun-burn, or the 
other tokens of experience which made the 
difference between her and them ? 

Supper was served on the large eastern ve- 
randa, with its lovely view of the Sans-Oreilles 
intervale, and the sharp mica-slate mountain- 
peaks beyond. “ When hunger now and thirst 
were fully satisfied,” the tables were carried off 
and the girls stayed where all was so cool and 
pleasant, watching the last glow on the eastern 
hills — some on the piazza-floor, some on 
cushions, a few in sea-chairs, one or two in 
hammocks — and “the conversation became 
general,” as the journals of clubs say. 

“ Dear Mrs. Knox,” said Blanche impetu- 
ously, “never you believe them. Atherton is 


118 


SYBIL KNOX. 


as big as London when it pleases ; and it is 
another Cranberry Centre when it pleases. 
And, if you will permit me to say so, I suppose 
that when My Lady the Duchess of Dragon- 
tail talks gossip in ’Er Majesty’s Drawing- 
room, the Drawing-room becomes Cranberry 
Centre. And also I suppose that when Cran- 
berry Centre discusses the good, the beautiful, 
and the true,” and here the girl struck an at- 
titude, “ then Cranberry Centre rises to become, 
with Floi’ence and Geneva and Damascus, one 
of the great aesthetic centres of the w'orld.” 

These last words the girl delivered with 
abundant gesture, as if she were an elocution- 
ist from the Tam worth “ School of Oratory,” 
to the great amusement of all the others. 

“That is all very fine,” said Mary Stiles, 
“and I say amen to it. But what I should 
like to know is this. Suppose it rains all day 
like fury. Suppose no one has gone out of the 
house, or means to. Suppose, in the hardest 
shower of all, the sun breaks out in the west. 
Suppose there is a magnificent sunset and rain- 
bow. 

“Now all the authorities wUl say — Miss 


SYBIL KNOX. 


119 


Edgeworth, Mrs. Farrar, Miss Sedgwick, Mar- 
garet Fuller will say — that one may leave the 
Woman's Tribune and Epictetus and go to the 
window to see the rainbow. That is granted. 

“ But at that fatal moment, under the rain- 
bow, you see Dr. Albert driving the calico 
mare like mad along the wet road. You can- 
not help seeing him. While you look you see 
Mrs. Knox’s carryall, with the span, all but- 
toned up against the weather. Say what you 
please, it is impossible not to wonder why she 
chooses that moment to drive. Before she is 
gone the gypsies come along, tether their 
horses, and make a fire at the end of Mrs. 
Knox’s avenue. 

“ In the evening Blanche Wilderspin walks 
in. Am I expected to say, ‘ Dear Blanche, all 
day I have waited for you to explain to me the 
method of the denudation of the hills in the 
Southern Tyrol ? ’ 

“ Or have I any rights? May I say, ‘ What 
under heaven sent Mrs. Knox to ride in all 
that rain ? ’ and ‘ What will she say when she 
finds those gypsies by the gate when she comes 
home ? ’ 


120 . 


SYBIL KNOX. 


“Dear Mrs. Knox, yon are fresli from 
tlie Pope, you are infallible. Tell us, oh! 
tell us, in this wilderness, what we shall 
say.” 

Mrs. Knox was delighted. Whatever else 
was to happen to her, she was to have two 
bright gilds at her right hand and her left, and 
in their companions she saw other possible 
friends, who would meet any social demands 
of winter evening, or loitering springs. She 
did not refuse Mary’s challenge. She had 
thought too much and talked too much about 
gossip and the danger of it not to have a good 
deal to say. Those bitter words of John Cou- 
dert’s about his mother, and that life of exile 
of his sisters in the “ disreputable attics ” of 
Paris, often came back to her. 

“My dear child,” said she, “all this is per- 
fectly admissible. Gypsies ! Why, I might 
talk with a Cardinal of Rome, or with Prince 
Bismarck, about gypsies. I might pull the 
sleeve of Sir Frederick Leighton at an opening 
of the Royal Academy and ask him about the 
color of a gypsy’s cheek. 

“It is not there that danger comes. But 


SYBIL KNOX. 


,121 


how will it be when dear old Dr. Moody has 
ridden over from the Institute to see me ? He 
has been sure that there was a volume of Bayle 
in my father’s library, and he is sorry to say 
that in the Institute library there is not a com- 
plete set. But it is very curious that there is 
not, for he remembers distinctly that in 1842, or 
possibly it was in 1843, — no, it was certainly in 
1842, because John Gilpin was living then, — at 
the meeting of Phi Beta at the Yale Com- 
mencement, old Dr. Hammersley, the same 
whose brother was defeated when the Federal- 
ists ran him for the Senate against Mr. Good- 
rich, told Dr. Parsons, who had gone down to 
Commencement, that he had seen a copy of 
Bayle, in the Latin, for sale at a New York 
auction, and that he had meant to buy it for 
the Institute, if he got back in time and had 
any money, but that unfortunately, when he 
came to the auction the sale had taken lalace 
the day before, and he had forgotten his cata- 
logue ; also that he had no money, because in 
paying his hotel bill he had offered them a 
twenty-dollar bill which proved wild-cat — wild- 
cat being a name which perhaps I do not re- 


122 


SYBIL KNOX. 


member, which was given to bills from the 
Western States ” 

And then, as she ran on with her really ad- 
mirable imitation of Dr. Moody, she saw the 
aside glance which Florence Carrigan threw 
on Mary Stiles, and, of course, broke off on 
the instant. 

“Where is the treasury? We must have a 
treasury on the piazza, and I will pay this 
Italian scudo for the first fine. But, girls, it 
is as I say. The danger comes, not with gyp- 
sies or rainbows, or the doctor’s calico horse. 
The danger comes when Dr. Moody comes.” 

“People are so very entertaining. Dear 
Mrs. Knox, I think they are a great deal more 
entertaining than the Silurian system or the 
fall of Constantinople.” 

“ Jenny dear, have the goodness to go and 
find the brown and black vase you were look- 
ing at, on the mantel-piece. Etruscan, you 
know. It has a small enough neck, which is 
big enough. That shall be the treasury for 
this house, and here is my fine. 

“ To think that at my first tea-party I should 
be the first sinner ! 


SYBIL KNOX. 


123 


‘‘Yes, Clara, I hear every word you say. 
People are very entertaining. And you and I 
will talk a great deal about people yet. But 
we will not speak ill of them except on the 
witness-stand. That was my husband’s rule, 
and it was a good one.” 

“But you did not speak ill of dear Dr. 
Moody.” 

“Nobody could speak ill of him. And I 
will send the Bayle over as my present to the 
Institute to-morrow. But, I am afraid, my 
dear, that if Mrs. Moody had been here I 
should not have gone into quite as much de- 
tail.” 

So they swung into the whole great question 
— and all the collateral questions. Was Ather- 
ton worse than Rutland or Castleton or Ben- 
nington ? Was it worse than Buffalo or Phil- 
adelphia or Chicago ? Was it worse than Lon- 
don or Paris or Rome ? 

Mary Stiles said that her mother said that 
Atherton took a great step, upward and for- 
ward, two generations ago, when the foreign 
missionary work came in. Mrs. Stiles said 
that it did no end of good to have a map of 


124 


SYBIL KNOX. 


India hung on the wall of the vestry, and to 
have letters from Burmapootra Jab, or Jaba- 
pootra Sim. She said that even if people 
talked scandal about Tippoo Sahib and the 
Brahmin Chunder-Blunder, that was better 
than talking it about Mrs. Pettingill and the 
Horsfords, and that just as soon as the school- 
girls were sending out clothes and playthings 
to some twin children Dr. Scudder had bap- 
tized, they were less censorious about each 
other’s bonnets. 

Another girl trumped this remark by saying 
that she thought Chautauqua deserved credit 
for doing the same thing, and the King’s 
Daughters. She said that John Everard, 
whom they all liked, said he was glad to meet 
a woman with a purple ribbon in her corsage, 
because he could suppose, at least at the begin- 
ning, that she was a woman of sense and not a 
fool. He could begin wi'th talk about Walter 
Besant, or General Booth, or the Congo nation, 
or Mr. Letch worth’s book, or something else 
sensible, and need not begin on the mud or the 
dust, or the color of the meeting-house. 

“ I do not want to talk forever about Long- 


SYBIL KNOX. 


125 


fellow’s birthday. But I had rather start with 
Longfellow’s birthday than with the color of 
Miss Naseby’s ribbons.” 

“We seem to come out with St. Paul,” said 
Mrs. Knox. 

“I am glad we do,” said Harriet Wood, 
“but I did not know it.” For she had been 
trained in that great gospel, “ Confess Igno- 
rance.” 

“‘Overcome evil with good,’” said Mrs. 
Knox, rising. “I begin to feel cold. Come 
into the parlor and interpret Beethoven to us. 
Miss Hatty. Do you know that story ? ” 

Ho ; the girls none of them knew the story. 

“ It was a favorite story of Mr. Knox’s. 
They were at a very grand dinner-party at the 
finest house in Buffalo. They were talking of 
grave social themes, as bright men and women 
will, and one of the most distinguished guests 
said, ‘It will be long before the sister who 
makes such good tomato-soup for us will iutei’- 
pret Beethoven when we ask her to.’ Well, 
the dinner went on, so bright and cheery that 
they did not like to leave the table. But 
when the last almond was eaten, and the last 


126 


SYBIL KNOX. 


grape, their host, a prince among gentlemen, 
said : 

“ ‘ Well, we will go into the music-room, 
and the sister who made the soup shall “inter- 
pret Beethoven” for us.’ She was his own 
beautiful daughter, one of the most accom- 
plished musicians of our day.” 

And they went into the parlor and Hatty 
Wood “ interpreted Beethoven.” 


CHAPTER XII. 


I T was not wholly as a matter of piazza- 
joking, that Sybil Knox was to test the 
capabilities of the gossiping of Atherton. 
She was the last person to know what Ather- 
ton had to say about her. But there were 
those who w^ere interested in her — yes, and 
were interested very tenderly, who had to 
study the questions of gossip and its conse- 
quences much more practically than she. 
Such a person, for instance, was John Coudert, 
far away on his travels. 

The reader has forgotten, perhaps, that Mrs. 
Edwards, on her first visit of inspection at the 
Knox house, after Sybil’s return, Avas surprised 
by the entrance of Horace Fort in his shirt- 
sleeves, and observed the familiar way in 
which he called the mistress “ Sybil.” Mrs. 
Knox had forgotten the incident. Indeed she 
had hardly known there was an incident. 
Mrs. Edwards had many other incidents of 

127 


128 


SYBIL KNOX. 


equal imiiortance to attend to. But she had 
attended to this, in its place and time ; she had 
planted the seed in fit soil, and the fruit of this 
planting was now planting itself all over the 
land. Had Sybil Knox given a hundred 
thousand dollars for a public library, that gift 
would not have been known in the State of 
Kentucky so widely as the greater fact that, 
on the Monday after her arrival in her old 
home, Horace Fort had come into her jiarlor in 
his shirt-sleeves and had called her “Sybil.” 
It may be added, even with some sadness as 
one writes, that if Horace Fort had made a new 
invention which would enlarge the physical 
force of the world ten per cent., it would have 
taken ten years before so many people, in any 
community, would have heard of it, as did hear 
that he was in his shirt-sleeves that morning. 
And if he had discovered a truth in education 
which would have lifted up a million children 
to stronger lives and better knowledge of God 
and of man, why, he would have been obliged 
to start a periodical, to organize a society, and 
to travel up and down through the land as an 
apostle for ten years, before he would dare to say 


SYBIL KKOX. 


129 


that as many people believed in his discovery, as 
there were people in America, who, within one 
month after he entered Sybil Knox’s parlor in 
his shirt-sleeves, believed and said that he and 
she were engaged to be married. 

Such is the interest which the world takes in 
marriage. It cares for marriage much more 
than it does for the multiplication of physical 
force, or for the elevation -of personal char- 
acter. Or, it would be better to say, it cares 
for it more constantly. 

The man who writes a story of six thousand 
words well, ending with a happy marriage, is 
well-nigh cure to have it accepted by a maga- 
zine-editor, and read by sympathizing thou- 
sands. 

As for the other man, whose short story of 
six thousand words turns on his improvement 
in school discipline, he will have but little 
chance with any editor— except the editors of 
Lexd a Haxd. 

For this excursus may this writer be for- 
given ! 

What is important in the course of this 
story is that, thanks to the general law which 


IBO 


SYBIL KNOX. 


has thus been laid down, and to the particular 
result of it in this instance, John Condert’s first 
news of Mrs. Knox, after he left New Yoi“k, 
was received at a hotel dining-table in Mem- 
phis. In the course of his Western business 
he had to spend a day in that city. He was at 
the Old Hickory Hotel, and at breakfast he 
met a gentleman and lady whom he had not 
seen since he was in Florence. It was a min- 
ute now, before he recollected who they wei’e, 
so difficult is it to recall a travelling-acquaint- 
ance when one sees him under wholly new 
conditions. But after a minute they were 
back again on their Italian experiences ; and 
so it was very natural for Mrs. Marvin to say 
to him, “And so our old friend, Mrs. Knox, is 
to be married again ? ” 

To poor John Coudert, who carried the 
thought of Mrs. Knox among his most sacred 
memories, and would hardly have spoken her 
name aloud without a certain care and tender- 
ness — to him to hear it pronounced in this off- 
hand way, as one might speak of Jim Mace, or 
of Tom Cribb, was in itself something horrible. 
To be told that she was to be married was to 


SYBIL KNOX. 


131 


be told that the dearest hope of his own life 
was vain. And to learn this from a person 
whose naihe he hardly knew, in the midst of 
the clattering of forks and the provision of 
omelettes and Lyonnaise potatoes, was one of 
the most cruel blows which the incongruity of 
fate had ever inflicted upon him. He knew 
perfectly well that his face flushed with color. 
But Mrs. Marvin was not looking at him, had 
no reason to think that he cared more for Mrs. 
Knox than he cared for Mrs. Cleveland or for 
Mrs. Harrison ; and she went gabbling on. 

In a minute more she was talking about the 
freshet on the river, about the arrival of the 
Judge Marshall steamboat, about the queer 
Italians of whom they had bought bananas 
the day before, and of other matters of in- 
terest equal to the engagement of Mrs. Knox. 

But John Coudert recovered himself so far 
as to call her back to Atherton and her news. 
She had almost forgotten that she had spoken 
of it. It had seemed necessary that she 
should speak, because, by the law which has 
been alluded to, people must talk of marriages. 
But, having spoken, she had relieved her 


132 


8YBIL KNOX. 


mind. With a good deal of difficulty she re- 
called the information. She was not sure 
whether Mrs. Knox were yet married, she be- 
lieved she was ; then she believed she was not. 
She did not recollect the name of the gentle- 
man to whom she was to be married ; only she 
was quite sure that it was some one Mrs. Knox 
had known in her youth. On second thought 
•she was perfectly sure that this was an early 
attachment which had been smothered, and 
which now had suddenly revived again. Any 
way, she was certain that, in a letter which she 
had received from Rutland, this matter was 
spoken of as quite taken for granted. 

It was with such comfort as this that poor 
John Coudert, who had been worshipping 
Sybil Knox in the absolute secrecy of the 
inner shiune of perfect homage, was obliged 
to go on his farther way, and, among other 
things, to conduct the inquiiies by which lie 
hoped to save her property from destruction. 

When the matters which led him to Mem- 
phis were adjusted, out of sheer bitterness of 
heart he took a steamboat up to St. Louis, as 
he might have done forty years ago, instead of 


SYBIL KNOX. 


133 


going more rapidly by land. What differ- 
ence did it make to him now whether he ar- 
rived at St. Louis a few hours earlier or later ? 
What difference did it make to him, in fact, 
whether he arrived anywhere earlier or later? 
He had nothing for it but duty now, and he 
could do his duty at St. Louis as well on 
Friday as he could on Thursday. With this 
despairing feeling of the worthlessness of his 
own life, John Coudert took his passage on 
an upward-bound steamboat. It need hardly 
be said that there was hardly another pas- 
senger on board, excepting a few people who 
meant to stop at landings by the way. 

Among these people, as it proved, were two 
German farmers, who talked all the time, in 
the security of their own language, of their 
own affairs. Coudert did not think it neces- 
sary to tell them that he understood them as 
well as if they spoke English ; he paid but lit- 
tle attention to what they said when they sat 
at table, he did not consult with them as he 
walked the deck in taking his solitary exer- 
cise. But it happened that, at supper on the 
night of the voyage, they left their talk of the 


1B4 


STBIL KNOX. 


ruling prices of honey, wax, and queen bees, 
and indulged in more general considerations. 

The talk fell on a contrast between the juris- 
prudence which Frederick the Great had 
bequeathed to Prussia and that which has 
grown up under the chances and changes of 
self-governing republics. They were willing 
enough to grant that, in some matters, the 
rough-and-ready methods of the American 
courts worked as favorably for the poor man 
as the dispensation of justice, from above 
below, in Prussia. But the younger of the 
two men pointed out, with a good deal of bit- 
terness, the injustice which could be done, 
under the systems of the Western States, to a 
man without friends and without money. 
And, by way of illustrating what he said, he 
referred, with a good many more oaths than 
it is necessary to put upon this page, to the 
case of “ that poor dog who was sent to prison 
for knowing more about the I’ailroad fire than 
anybody else knew.” The words “railroad 
fire” caught John Coudert’s ear, and from 
the sad wandering of his thought back to 
Vermont and the life of the American colony 


SYBIL KNOX. 


135 


in Rome, lie came to listen with all liis ears to 
what the critical German had to say. The 
other was stupid and did not understand, so 
that it was necessary for the cynic to go into 
some little detail, and it was clear enough that 
they had both been present, waiting for a case 
of their own to turn up, at a trial in the court 
of their own county, in which two men had 
been indicted for arson. The building burned 
was a railroad station ; one man had been sen- 
tenced for five years for setting it on fire, and 
the other had been sentenced for two years. He 
had been the man who had first charged the 
other with the offence, but the district-attor- 
ney had come to the conclusion that they were 
accomplices, and this second man, who was a 
German, had been included in the indictment, 
and had been sentenced to the shorter term of 
imprisonment. According to the cynic who 
told the story, he had been sentenced, only 
because he had no money to pay a lawyer, 
and because there was nothing else to do with 
him. According to him, the real criminal 
would never have been detected but for the in- 
formation of the poor traveller. But what 


136 


SYBIL KNOX. 


was more important to John Coudert was, that 
the name of the poor fellow thus unjustly 
handled was Berlitz. 

The name Berlitz is not as common as the 
name Schmidt, and John Coudert believed 
implicitly in that doctrine which makes a man 
follow out the lead of what is said to come to 
him by accident. He addressed himself to the 
Germans in his best Berlinese, rather to their 
surprise. He had time enough to iDump out 
from them all that they knew of the story, 
which he found, alas ! vague and imperfect. 
None the less, however, as soon as they arrived 
in St. Louis did he take his traps across to the 
railway station, and, by a night train, return 
to Pittsburg, that he might follow out the 
clew which was thus given to him. 

For, though Sybil Knox must be nothing to 
j)Oor John Coudert, from this time forward, he 
did not mean to abandon the one commission 
which he had considered that he had received 
at her hands. And so, unconsciously to her, 
he rode all that night at forty miles an hour 
in the pursuit of this will-o’ the wisp. 


CHAPTER XIII. 


0 return to Atlierton for a little. Mrs. 



JL Knox was wholly unconscious all this 
time that she had been married to Horace 
Fort, or that anybody had said she had been 
married to him. Even Atherton itself had 
forgotten, that, for a week, the story had grown 
hotter and hotter of their engagement. 
Atherton itself had forgotten that it had 
selected the groomsman and the bridesmaids. 
Atherton itself had forgotten that it had 
speculated on what the fee to the minister 
would be, and where the wedding journey 
would take the bride and bridegroom. It had 
forgotten as well all its speculation as to the 
wedding-dress which Sybil Knox would wear, 
and whether the wedding would be in the 
morning at her house or in the evening at the 
church. It is quite true that Atherton had, in 
the week after the story started, given a good 
deal of attention to these particulars. Its 


137 


138 


SYBIL KNOX. 


views on these points had trickled out and 
gone as far as Rutland, as the reader knows, 
and from Rutland they had been conveyed on 
the wings of the wind to different parts of the 
world interested in such subjects. But none 
the less had Atherton wholly forgotten the 
importance which the matter had once as- 
sumed in its eyes. 

The truth was that Horace Fort had been 
given to understand, by some pretty sharp 
language on the part of Mrs. Sybil Knox, that 
he took unnecessary airs on himself, and 
assumed too much intimacy in the house 
which was reopened. He sulked a little 
under this treatment ; he had then been in- 
vited by a friend to go off on a fishing-party 
in the north of Maine ; he had gone on this 
party, and had been away all summer ; and 
Atherton had not only forgotten his wedding, 
but had forgotten him. 

And Mrs. Knox was wondering more and 
more why her friends in Rome had said such 
discouraging things — not of Atherton, of 
which they knew nothing, but of places which 
they supposed Atherton resembled. To say 


SYBIL KNOX, 


139 


the truth, she had struck her old home at a 
particularly favorable time. Had she arrived 
at Thanksgiving or a little after — had she been 
obliged to take it first in the blockade, of the 
winter storms, and then in the worse blockade 
of the mud and necessary slush of March and 
April, she would have known better what they 
talked about, when they spoke of the tyranny 
of what, in another page, has been called the 
mild police ” of such a town, but which they 
did not consider mild in any sense. As it 
proved, for June, July, August, September, 
and October, Atherton was alive with parties 
of visitors, and was at its very best. It ought 
to be named in the history of the nineteenth 
century as the town famous for picnics. In 
the geographies, where it says, “Lowell, 
Lawrence, and Holyoke are great points of 
manufacture; Lynn and Worcester supply 
large quantities of shoes ; Cambridge is the 
seat of a university ; and Plymouth is the 
oldest town in New England,” it should say, 
“and Atherton is celebrated for its picnics.” 
I have been in no place where the method of 
the picnic was so well digested, and where it 


140 


SYBIL KNOX. 


was SO completely taken for granted as a part 
of civilized life. By which I mean, that these 
people had attained that height, rare indeed 
to the New Englander, in which one knows, in 
the very fibre of his life, that all is well when 
he is in the open air, while he suspects that 
which he cannot prove — that indoors things 
are apt to go badly. 

In Atherton, we say, as the sun begins to 
go down, “What a nice afternoon for a pic- 
nic ! ” And you send over a note to Jane, you 
ask the doctor to stop at Mary’s, you run up a 
little flag, Avhich is a signal to them at John’s, 
and, without a word of other preparation, 
three or four families of you find yourselves, 
at five in the afternoon, either on a hillside, 
overlooking half the world, or in a mica- 
slate gorge, where such a cascade is falling as 
would be marked with a double cross in a 
hand-book of Switzerland, or under the shade 
of the apple trees on the old deserted Griswold 
place, where the orioles and robins are tamer 
than they are anywhere else in the world, and 
where, but for the apple trees, it would seem 
as if the foot of man had never stepped before. 


SYBIL KNOX. 


141 


And for this operation all that has been 
necessary is to say to Asaph Hears that he 
may harness the carry -all, and to Bridget that 
we are going to take tea out of doors, and 
then to step into the carry-all and to go there. 
There are baskets in every house planned with 
absolute precision for the picnic’s adventure. 
Every Bridget knows precisely how the coffee 
is to be arranged, and how many sandwiches 
and hard-boiled eggs, and provisions without 
a name, will be necessary for the party in 
hand. Every one of the families to whom the 
signal has been sent knows, by a divine 
instinct, what it can fm-nish best for the 
occasion, and infallibly there is on a visit at one 
of the houses somebody, from the other side of 
the world it may be, whose presence is enough 
to make the occasion a different picnic from 
any that ever met before. I do not care how 
old the inhabitant is who attends on this 
joyous occasion, he always feels as if he had 
never been at that place before, and as if there 
had never been a picnic at Atherton before. 
And yet, in point of fact, as the summer goes 
by, these excellent people spend three days 


142 


SYBIL KNOX. 


out of four, in some such enterprise in the 
open air. 

So it happened that as Mrs. Knox ordered 
her carriage for an afternoon drive, rather 
doubting, in her own mind, which of four or 
five possibilities she should select for her 
guests, she saw a white flag run up a little spar 
above the barn of the Carrigan house. The 
ready opera-glass showed that the flag carried 
the figure 6. 

Mrs. Knox went to the foot of the stairway 
in the hall and called to the girls above : 

“Mary, tell them all that the Carrigans 
have a picnic at five, and we will go with them. 
You will want to be ready to start ten minutes 
before five.” And then she bade little Clar- 
chen Berlitz run up the blue flag in answer. 
The child was signal-mistress by this time, and 
was delighted with all the enginery of cords 
and bunting. 

And so it was that, with a promptness which 
would have delighted Von Moltke, within a 
minute of the stroke of five of the clock, there 
gathered by the little green patch, where the 
county road crosses the new road to the 


SYBIL KNOX. 


143 


station, four different carry-alls, two young 
gentlemen and three bright girls on horse- 
back. Mrs. Carrigan, from her own carriage, 
welcomed each arrival, and gave her orders. 
They were to rendezvous, by whatever route 
they liked, at the bars beyond Gershom’s barn. 
She had bidden her own boy ride forward that 
the bars might be taken down, and little 
Cephas Gershom be ready to put them up 
again. 

“ So good-bye till then,” said the hospitable 
lady who had so suddenly assembled the 
party. “ I am glad to see your banjo. Will.” 
And, by different routes, they drove to 
Gershom’s. 

Our particular party, which means Mrs. 
Knox’s, consisted of herself, and two Soames 
girls, Avith a friend of theirs, Mary Saville, 
from Elmira. She had known these girls in 
Rome, where they had spent a winter together, 
and she had sent for them to make her a long 
summer visit. Among the other young people 
there was a theory that Harry Spaulding and 
Ned Walker, who were two of the cavaliers, 
had a special interest in the Elmira party. 


144 


SYBIL KNOX. 


But nobody really knew. The young men 
said, and. perhaps thought, that they ivere at 
the Chittenden House in the village because it 
was a convenient centre for their fishing. All 
parties were away from home, meant to have 
what Dfyd.en and the vernacular call “a good 
time,” and, in literal fact, were having it. 
Cephas G-ershom had both sets of bars down, 
and beamed, with a well-pleased smile, as Mrs. 
Piper threw him an orange, and as Mary 
Soames found for him a cream-cake. The 
cortege worked its way under a magnificent 
grove of hemlocks, and then the gentlemen of 
the party, with Alonzo and Nahum Gershom, 
saw to the horses. A waterfall on one side, a 
green grass sward for nymphs to glory in on 
another, shade for those who were warm, and 
sunshine for those who were cold — there was 
nothing more to ask for. 

Had never naiad such a bath, 

Nor dryad such a fane ! 

The party resolved itself into its elements, 
or, as Charles Fouiner would say, divided 
according to the attractions. Certain lads and 


SYBIL KNOX 


145 


lasses, preordained to such industries, spread 
a cloth under some old apple trees, and 
brought out as much and as little china, as much 
and as little Bohemian pottery, as many olives 
and as few, as much and as little cake, cold 
beef, and warm coffee, as the precise fitness of 
things required. Between them and the 
brook, with their backs against a log which 
still bore George III.’s broad arrow, — which 
had been cut for his navy while the Hampshire 
grants were his, but which never bore his flag 
because Stark beat Baum at Bennington — with 
their backs against this log, I say, sat Will 
Piper and Ned Walker thrumming on their 
banjos. On the sward before them, to the 
time of their sharply accented music, were 
waltzing three or four couples of the other 
young people. And, under the hemlocks, just 
above, where you command that wonderful 
vista down the little valley, which is only 
shut in by the faint blue of Mt. Marcy, a 
hundred miles away, sat, or lounged, or 
lay on the ground, three or four of the 
elders, well-pleased with the beauty, the 
harmonies, and the simplicity of the little 


146 


SYBIL KNOX. 


drama, and the scenery in which it was going 
on. 

“Yes,” said Mrs. Carrigan, the same who 
had set this pretty ball in motion, “you may 
say Avhat you choose, it is better for people to 
be under the sky.” 

“That is what the dominie says every Sun- 
day. His ‘fourthly’ is invariably like this, 
‘ And would it not be well for us, dear friends, 
in consideration of what has been said, to leave 
these prisons which we call homes, and under 
the open arch of God’s temple’ — and so on, 
and so on.” 

“I wish all dominies had half his sense,” 
said she, “whoever he is. Mrs. Knox, you 
worry yourself about gossip. If people are 
pressing ferns, or are looking at the spores of 
mares’ tails, they will not be discussing your 
dress or mine.” 

“ I wonder if people discuss dress in Southern 
California. Mr. Hale says they are out-doors 
there from seven in the morning on the 1st of 
January till eleven at night on the 31st of 
December.” 

“ Do not fret yourself about gossip, my dear 


SYBIL KNOX. 


147 


Mrs. Knox. There are worse misfortunes than 
the friendly interest of your neighbors.” 

“I call it the mild police,” said Colonel 
Carrigan, coming in from an inspection of the 
Gershom live-stock. 

“Mild police, if you please. The same in- 
terest which makes Miss Ann Stiles wonder 
why I turned my barege dress in October, 
rather than November, made her send in better 
beef-tea than any of us knew how to make, 
when John was on his back in December. 
Take it for all in all, I am glad I am not Mrs. 
Robinson Crusoe.” 

“But,” said Mrs. Knox, “we are not dis- 
cussing that question. I do not want to be 
Robinson Crusoe. What I want to know is, 
where does one live in this world, among other 
people, and hear the least petty talli about 
what his neighbors are doing ? Where could 
I live, for instance, where I should not know 
that if I wore my last dress by Worth the 
neighbors would say that I was showing my- 
self off because they did not have such nice 
gowns, and where, if I wore a plain cashmere, 
they would not say ‘ Mrs. Knox does not think 


148 


SYBIL KNOX. 


we are grand enough to see her fine things 
from Europe ? ’ Is there any such Happy 
Valley, or any such oasis in a desert, or is 
there any place called Washington, where this 
should happen to me ? Or where shall such 
rest be found ?” 

“As for that,” said Colonel Carrigan, “I 
should say promptly that people talk as much 
gossip in one place as another. But if you 
happen to live in as small a place as Cranberry 
Centre gossip comes back to you, while if you 
live in Washington or New York you are so 
much engaged in other things that you do not 
happen to hear of it. 

“I could make you an excellent illustra- 
tion from the laws of sound. You may be 
in a small place, where your voice is flung 
right back on you. You may be in a large 
hall, where your voice is not flung back 
upon you, but is flung up and down and 
right and left over the people who sit before 
you. 

“ You go back from speaking in that hall, 
and you say to the architect, ‘ There are no 
echoes in your hall, Mr. Wren,’ when the 


SYBIL KNOX. 


149 


truth is that there are echoes enough, only 
you did not happen to hear them.” 

“That is all very pretty,” said his wife, 
“and I suppose there is something in it. At 
the same time, I think Mrs. Knox would say, 
if she ventured to speak, that she found, after 
they had been a few hours in one of the Roman 
galleries, that they had some things to talk 
about, which they did not have after they had 
been ten days shut up in a gale in the ladies’ 
saloon of the Germanic. Now, for precisely 
the same reason, it will happen that, after we 
have spent a week or two by ourselves in 
Atherton, the newspaiiers all shut off because 
there is a snow-storm, all life shut off because 
the ground is five feet under snow, we are a 
little bit more apt to talk about Mrs. Good- 
child’s chickens and guinea-hens than we 
should be if we were j ust coming home from 
the Vatican.” 

“Somebody once said that 

‘ ‘ The proper study of mankind is man, 
and a good deal of respect has been given to 
this somebody. His name was Alexander 
Pope.” 


150 


SYBIL KNOX. 


“Yes, and he was a sad gossip, I am afraid, 
from all that I know of him. Indeed, I should 
suspect, from the very poem from which you 
quote, that he knew as much of the imperfec- 
tions of his fellow-creatures as most people do, 
and that he was not disinclined to speak of 
them.” 

“That may be; still, I do not think that 
Mr. Pope, or anybody else who likes to discuss 
human nature, would have told us, in good 
classical measure, that ‘ Mrs. George Cobleigh 
presented a large and bountiful wedding-cake,’ 
and that ‘ her work in that line is such as few 
may venture to surpass’ ; that ‘Mr. C. P 
Davenport gave a greenback’ V. to his minister,’ 
or that ‘ Mr. and Mrs. W. K. Farr gave a pair 
of the same value, and Grandma Emerson gave 
a carving-set ; ’ or that ‘ Miss Ida Miner, a 
sister of the bride, gave her a crocheted 
afglian.’ ” 

These facts he read from the county news- 
paper, which he took from his pocket, quoting 
its description of an ecclesiastical party in the 
neighborhood. 

But here Mrs. Knox interrupted him. She 


SYBIL KNOX. 


151 


said, ‘^Let us do one tiling at once, Colonel. 
We are not discussing tlie press or its short- 
comings, which are many in most countries. 
We are discussing the conditions of gossip, 
and I am trying to find out — what I have been 
trying to find out in three or four different 
circles — whether there is any more of it in 
Atherton than there is in Eome.” 

But at this moment they were all summoned 
to partake of the picnic, and all had the satis- 
faction of eating something which they had 
never seen before, while each had provided 
something for the hunger and thirst of the 
others. The charm of Atherton in its picnics 
showed itself here. The real charm of a picnic 
is that the lady of the house, while she pre- 
pares a supper, as she should do, eats a supper 
which she has not prepared. There are certain 
traditions in each Vermont household as to 
what can and cannot be done, with the maxi- 
mum of eggs, the maximum of sugar, the 
minimum of flour, and the maximum of cream. 
There is also a ivell-defined certainty that man 
does not live by cake alone, but by certain 
food more sustaining ; so that there were 


163 


SYBIL KNOX. 


various provisions on the cloth, which, was 
spread upon the sward, more satisfactory to 
persons who have passed forty years of age, 
and far better fitted for the machinery of their 
internal system, than these elegancies which 
have been described. 

Under all these agreeable circumstances the 
conversation turned. They certainly did not 
discuss people ; they did not talk a great deal 
about what they ate ; least of all did they say 
that they Avere sick, or tell what was the mat- 
ter with them, or with what medicines they 
hoped to be cured. But in the wholesome and 
natural way, in Avhich talk Avill run on where 
there are pretty girls and unaffected boys, 
where there are men off duty and Avomen 
without care, they told stories and trumped 
them, they passed “from grave to gaA’’, from 
lively to sevei’e,” till a black thunder-cloud 
made its appearance along the southern sky. 

Colonel Carrigan pointed his long finger at 
it, as he saw it first through the line of locusts. 
Ev'ery one sprang to his feet. The table-com- 
mittee in a moment had emptied cups and 
saucers, and in a magically short time had 


SYBIL KNOX. 


1.53 


wiped them somehow and had packed them. 
The boys had put the headstalls on the horses, 
backed them into the carriages, and brought 
the carriages round. And, in half an hour 
from the time when the senior party was dis- 
cussing the laws of conversation, and the junior 
party was waltzing on the green, the whole 
company, almost at a 2.40 gait, were rattling 
along the Vernon road, with the sides of the 
carriages ivell buttoned down, so that, before 
the shower had pelted on them more than five 
minutes, every horse, every carriage, every 
boy, and every girl, ivere under shelter. 

We are most interested in Mrs. Knox. 
There had been a covered way arranged at 
the side of her house, so that she stepped 
from the carriage, without so much as a drop 
of rain falling upon her. She did not even 
have to change her shoes, and if there had 
been forty grandmothers in the house they 
could not have persuaded her that she would 
take cold. She was able at once to turn to the 
mail, which had been brought in since she 
went away. She ran over the half-dozen let- 
ters before opening them, and being quite 


154 


SYBIL KNOX. 


alone, she selected, as that which she should 
read first, one of which she knew the hand- 
writing perfectly, though she did not know 
why it was mailed from St. Louis. 

When she read it she was astonished, more 
than she had been astonished for years, nor 
could she understand it. The reader Avill see 
why if he has the whole letter laid before him : 

John Coudert to Mrs. Sybil Knox. 

“ St. Louis, August 4. 

“ My dear Mrs. Knox : I still address 
you by this name, because, although I have 
heard of your marriage, I do not know who is 
so fortunate as to have changed it. It was 
only by accident that I heard, at Memphis, of 
an event so important to you and your friends, 
of which, by some chance, I had not heard be- 
fore. But the world is not large, it seems, 
although we try to persuade ourselves that it 
is. You have here my excuses for not being 
earlier in sending my good wishes, and my 
apology at the same time for addressing you 
by the name under which I knew you. I think 
I may presume so far upon our acquaintance — 
I wish I might say our friendship— as to feel 
that I am among those who are privileged to 


SYBIL KNOX. 


155 


express high, hopes for your future. (I never 
permit myself to congratulate a lady on the 
occasion of marriage. I remember, when I 
was a boy, I said to one of my girl friends, 

^ Congratulation implies effort.’ I am not 
sure if this is so, but I have held to that 
scripture ever since.) I certainly send my 
congratulations to your husband, and I beg 
that you will do me the favor to offer them to 
him. 

‘‘May I also ask that you will have the 
kindness to send to me your new address ? 

“ Lest you should think that I am presump- 
tuous in preferring this request, I will venture 
to tell you on what enterprise I am engaged. 
I am afraid it is a somewhat hopeless one. 

“ When I was in New York I had occasion 
to examine the present condition of the Catta- 
raugus and Opelousas Railroad property. At 
my advice, some of my relatives have invested 
a very considerable part of their property in 
these securities, and, on my return, I was dis- 
mayed to find tliat the depreciation in their 
price was still going on. I had thought it a 
mere accident of the stock-market, and that, 
with returning good sense and the true pros- 
perity of the country, this property would 
attain its former standard. As I was the 
adviser of my sister and other friends, it is my 


166 


SYBIL KNOX. 


duty to see that my advice is justified if possi- 
ble. I have therefore come to the West, clad 
with a good deal of authority from holders of 
the first and second bonds, and am ti’ying to 
make an investigation into the condition of 
.that property. 

“ It was thus that, without in the least inter- 
fering in other people’s affairs, I learned, 
almost by accident, in New York, that at one 
time you had a considerable investment in this 
property. I allude to it now that I may ven- 
ture to advise you and your husband not to be 
induced too hastily, by any counsellor, to 
sacrifice the property at its present market 
rates. I am in possession of information which 
must materially affect the market, when it is 
known. I cannot but hope that it may be so 
used as shall be for the benefit of all of us. I 
am probably not at liberty to say more now ; 
but if you will tell me in whose hands you 
may place your interests, if at any momentyou 
entrust them to any one besides our friend 
Kendrick, I shall be glad of the opportunity 
of advising with him confidentially. 

“There is another matter in which you are 
interested, in wdiich I have interested myself 
as well. It is as to the present position of a 
man named Berlitz, of whom, I think, you 
know something. Judge Kendrick (what the 


SYBIL KNOX. 


157 


newspaper people call our ‘mutual friend’) 
gave me some particulars of the curious ro- 
mance by which you and he were mixed up with 
the affairs of Berlitz’ s widow — if she be a 
widow. I fancied, I hardly know why, that I 
might unravel that mystery. I have, almost 
at this moment, possessed myself of another 
trail or clew, and, if I follow it to any advan- 
tage, I will certainly let you know what are 
the results. Perhaps you will be so kind as to 
tell me where Mrs. Berlitz is now living, that I 
may communicate with her. 

“Pardon me, dear Mrs. Knox, — or I should 
say, Madame I’Inconnue, — for taking so much 
time from a season which must be crowded 
with pleasure. Our little correspondence 
always gave me much pleasure, and I should 
be sorry to think that it must be interrupted 
jfaow. My address for some time will be Pitts- 
^ burg, Pennsylvania. This does not mean that 
I am to live there, but it is a central place from 
which I can easily order my letters. 

“With my best respects, and renewed con- 
gratulations to your husband, I am, 

“Very truly yours, 

“John Coudert.” 

Sybil Knox could hardly believe her eyes. 
Her first thought was that John Coudert had 


* 


158 


SYBIL KNOX. 


gone crazy. If he had gone crazy, however, 
there was method in his madness. Then she 
had that curious feeling that he had folded 
the wrong letter, and put it into an envelope 
intended for somebody else. But of course 
she saw that this would not do : she was 
addressed by name on the inside of the letter, 
as she was addressed on the outside. Who in 
the world had told John Coudert that she was 
married ? To whom in the world had that 
person said she was married ? Or, rather, if 
that person had not said she was married, to 
whom in the world had that person thought she 
was married ? Where had she been, what had 
she done, what had she said, which should 
make her the victim of other people’s talk ? 
Or what should have given the slightest 
foundation for so absurd a stoi’y? Could it 
have been that she had come into some “ society 
newspaper” without knowing it? Or possi- 
bly that there had been an account of the 
marriage of some other Mrs. Knox, or Miss 
Knox ? Had some reporter mistaken an 
actress for her, or her for an actress? And 
what freak of destiny was it which had sent 


SYBIL KNOX. 


159 


across the world this mish-mash of manu- 
factured intelligence, as absurd as the an- 
nouncement of the wedding of Semiramis to 
Benjamin Franklin, so that poor John Coudert 
should read or should hear 2 


CHAPTER XIV. 


D ORCASYILLE was the county town in 
which was the building which an- 
swered for Jail and House of Correction, 
which John Coudert, for other men’s sins, 
was now to investigate. Dorcasville had been 
left on both sides by the railroad engineers of 
that region. It had been erected fifty years 
ago, when a network of canals was stretched 
through and over the State — canals which exist 
now only for the benefit of boys who wish to 
fish, and, in a few cases, for a wretched water- 
power which they created and still maintain. 
The gay and lively stage-lines which once 
stopped for breakfast, for dinner, and for 
supper, at the Dorcasville Eagle, long since 
ceased to run or to stop. The Dorcasville 
Eagle, even, suspended his operations, and 
his inn was closed. Boards were nailed across 
the windows to save them from the missiles of 
boys. And the proud bird himself, taken from 


SYBIL KNOX. 


161 


the post which he adorned, was carried to a 
museum as a relic of the past. But the inconve- 
nience to the officers of the court and other 
antiquarians, who still had to come to Dorcas- 
ville twice a year, and perhai^s oftener, had 
compelled a public movement by which the old 
“Tavern” was reopened. A veteran of the 
war was placed there to live without rent, and 
to keep it for what he could get. Thus were 
accommodations secured for the justices on 
their circuits, and the immediate danger 
averted that even the county records and the 
jail, which were the last relics of the grandeur 
of Dorcasville, should be removed to Homer, 
where the B. & J.. crossed the line of the A. & 
Q. roads, a smart village, which “claimed” 
ten thousand inhabitants, and had, by actual 
census-count, six hundred and seventy-one. 

In this shelter, which maintained the tradi- 
tions of hospitality with as little of their 
substance as is possible in those Ohio-washed 
States, where no man was ever hungry, John 
Coudert found himself laid by to rest, after 
driving across on a buck-board from the junc- 
tion at Homer. Never was a more dismal wel- 


162 


SYBIL KNOX 


come. He had taken the one-armed proprietor 
by surprise, the wife of the one-armed proprietor 
was indignant at the arrival of a stranger after 
she had cleared up for the evening, and itVas 
clear that he was not welcome. In his most 
engaging vein, however, he assured the lady 
of the house that he did not want a hot supper 
after his drive. He asked her if she could not 
give him some bread and milk, to which she 
answered that she could not, but that “there was 
crackers.” In a little, he found himself at a 
dirty, India-rubber-covered table, with a plate 
of crackers which had been left by some baker 
as a specimen of his craft some weeks before. 
But there was a great flagon of milk, which 
had neither been salted nor otherwise pre- 
served, but was fresh from some Dorcasville 
cow. John Coudert was too old a campaigner 
to be dissatisfied with this provision. He made 
himself comfortable with his supper, and then 
w'ent out to be inspected upon the piazza of the 
house. He found here, as he expected, two 
or three loafers of the neighborhood, who had 
not yet outlived the customs of the days when 
Dorcasville was more alive. He seated himself 


SYBIL KKOX. 


163 


in the midst of them with a ‘^good-evening,” 
offered a cigar to one and another, which was 
accepted, and, before the evening was over, he 
knew the gossip of the place, on the subject 
about which he had come to inquire. 

The next morning he called upon the keeper 
of the prison. To his relief, though hardly to 
his surprise, he found an intelligent dreamer, 
who, in the queer lottery of public appoint- 
ment in those States, had been put in charge 
of the county prison. The man was not sur- 
prised that a visitor should come to inquire 
after one of his prisoners; he would not have 
been surprised had this visitor had two wings 
to cover his head and two to cover his feet and 
two with which to fly. He admitted Coudert 
into the great room where the prisoners were 
making harnesses, under the eye of a contrac- 
tor ; called Berlitz from his work-bench, and 
left the two alone. Coudert had been well 
aware that his difficulty would be in overcoming 
the shyness or the pride, which all persons had 
told him was a characteristic of Berlitz. He 
had provided himself, with some sense of the- 
atrical effect, with quite a parcel of German 


164 


SYBIL KNOX. 


newspapers, some pictorial papers, and even 
one from Berlin itself. But his man was evi- 
dently cowed and discouraged. The sight of 
portraits, even of persons whose names he had 
heard all his life in German talk, did not seem 
to be much encouragement to him. When 
Coudert produced some short-cut tobacco, and 
asked him if that came into the prison ration, 
he took more interest in his companion, and 
after a little the suspicion which he showed at 
first gave ivay. But the real theatrical stroke 
was given, notin the presentation of tobacco, nor 
in the cold glancing at newspapers, but when 
Coudert mentioned, as by accident, the name 
of his wife and of his child, and told him that 
they were in America. At the instant the man 
was transformed. He had been too proud to 
write to his wife from a prison ; he had, of 
course, received no communication from her. 
But from that instant John Coudert was sure 
that those had maligned poor Berlitz, who had 
made the ready suggestion of “ the other 
woman.” He had already been sure that he 
had struck the right man. 

Poor Berlitz’s story was but an amplification 


SYBIL KNOX. 


165 


of that which his countrymen had talked over 
when Coudert saw them on the steamboat. 
He was crossing the country, not very far 
from the place where they were, when, at a 
junction, it was necessary for him to sit up five 
or six hours at a railroad station to wait for a 
train. One would say, there was, of course, no 
provision by which he could even lie at length. 
As he said, if he could have gone to sleep, he 
should not have been in prison. He was forced 
by the regulations of the place to sit bolt up- 
right on a seat, which was provided with 
arms, apparently with the fear that anybody 
would lie down in a station-house, which was 
built for the purpose of travellers spending half 
the night there. Bolt upright in this way he 
sat, and from the window he saw lights mov- 
ing in a way that would have arrested any 
man’s curiosity, for he saw that whoever was 
handling them was trying to conceal his mo- 
tions, and that for no good end. To tell very 
briefly the story, which he told Coudert at 
great length, when he was sure that Coudert 
was his friend, he saw that there was an at- 
tempt made to set fii’e to the wood-yard of the 


166 


SYBIL KNOX. 


station. At once he went to communicate 
what he had learned to the ticket-master, to 
find that there was no ticket-master on hand. 
It proved, indeed, as the story went on, that 
the ticket-master himself was the person who 
was engaged in starting the fire. Then Berlitz 
ran out to give an alarm in the neighborhood ; 
but at that moment the sudden blaze seemed 
to make it necessary that he should give more 
practical attention to the conflagration itself. 
Then it was that he had been suddenly knocked 
down, had lost his senses for a little, and, after 
he recovered, the firemen of the village were 
beginning to assemble, and Berlitz was no more 
than anybody else was. 

The upshot of it all was that when, on the 
next morning, he told his story, he found him- 
self arrested as the man who had set the build- 
ing on fire, and at the trial his own assevera- 
tions of innocence had gone for but little. 
There being, however, no practical evidence 
against him, except that he was found on the 
ground with a heavy bruise on his head, the 
judge had made his sentence shorter than that 
of the real incendiary, who had been sentenced 


SYBIL KNOX. 


167 


to five years, while Berlitz’ s sentence was for 
two only. 

Coudert now made it his business to ascer- 
tain, as well as he could, what could have 
been the motive with which the real incen- 
diary had addressed himself to his work. 
Why should the ticket-master of a station un- 
dertake to burn down the property of his 
employers ? All his attempts to draw anything 
from the man himself were perfectly futile. 
He evidently did not mean to give himself 
away.” Coudert talked with the amiable 
idealist who managed the prison with absolute 
nicety. But he found in him a man who re- 
garded all persons as equally criminal and 
equally innocent. He spoke of them all, as if 
they were the subjects of disease, and as if 
this attack of incendiarism might have come 
upon this man as a nervous headache comes 
upon a woman, or an attack of colic upon a 
child who has eaten green fruit. He hoped 
that both the prisoners would recover from 
their illness, before the terms of their imprison- 
ment were over, and for the rest it was hardly 
worth while to inquire as to their particular 


168 


SYBIL KNOX. 


symptoms or what had aggravated them. 
jCoudert left the prison, promising Berlitz to 
correspond with him, and disposed himself to 
go to the seat of government of the State, to 
have some conversation with the attorney- 
general, whose services, as he was glad to find, 
had been called in in the prosecution of per- 
sons arrested under circumstances so re- 
markable. 


CHAPTER XV. 


RS. KNOX was more annoyed than the 



-LV_L occasion would seem to demand, by the 
intimation in John Coudert’s letter that she 
was not Mrs. Knox, but was Mrs. Somebodyelse. 
The girls who were visiting her observed that 
she was silent that evening. She did not join 
them in the morning when they read aloud, 
and in the afternoon she let them go to drive 
without her. Instead of going to drive, she 
walked down to Mrs. Carrigan’s. Between the 
two there had been gradually growing up a real 
friendship — a friendship which was more than 
an accidental intimacy, and more even than a 
concurrence of tastes. But this was the first 
time that Mrs. Knox had fairly tested it. She 
did so now with great reluctance, but she felt 
that she was, so to speak, “in for it.” If she 
lived in Atherton, she must have the absolute 
confidence of some one in Atherton, and she felt 
sure of Jane Carrigan. She must tell some- 


170 


SYBIL KNOX. 


body about her annoyance, and she would 
trust this new friend. 

Mrs. Carrigan, of course, was not alone. 
Who had ever found her alone ? There was 
a great group of the guests and the guests’ 
friends and the friends of the guests’ friends, 
sitting on the piazza or lying in the hammocks 
or on the grass, some of them pretending to 
watch a lawn-tennis jiarty which was imme- 
diately below. The Carrigan house was one of 
the wonders. It had been said at one time, 
that if anybody went to tea with Colonel Car- 
rigan, he built an extra room at the end of the 
house, so that he could ask them to make a 
long visit. The house had that look of growth 
which makes a country house so charming. 

Mrs. Knox sat for a little in the shade, 
watching the tennis-players, and took the cup 
of tea which Mrs. Carrigan had ready for her 
and for forty other people ; but as she went 
across for a second lump of sugar she bent 
over enough to say, “ I want to see you alone.” 
Accordingly, in a little they were alone, 
without anybody missing either of them, in 
that nice corridor which runs out at the side 


SYBIL KNOX. 


171 


of the north L. Then Sybil Knox told her 
friend, in as few words as she could, what she 
had heard — namely, that she was married to 
somebody, she did not know whom, and she 
did not know how the story had started. 

Laughing, but with the tears running down 
her face, she said, “I heard all this twenty- 
four hours ago. I slept very little last night, 
and I have come to you. Everybody knows 
more about my affairs than I know myself. 
What am I to do to contradict it ? ” 

But, to her real relief, she found Mrs. Car- 
rigan as much surprised as she was. She sat 
up in the hammock in which she had stretched 
herself, almost rose to her feet, and simply said, 
“An enemy has done this.” Then in a flash 
she added, ‘ ‘ That is impossible, my dear child, 
for you have not an enemy in the world.” 

“That is just what I should have said my- 
self,” said Sybil Knox. “ I am not in the 
habit of thinking I have enemies. I do not 
know how anybody could have started such a 
rigmarole story. But this gentleman who 
writes me — I may as well tell you who he is ; 
he is a Mr. Coudert, an intelligent Pennsyl- 


172 


SYBIL KNOX. 


vania man whom I saw a good deal in Italy — 
he is not a fool. He would not have written 
as he did unless this story were quite well 
started. This man heard it at Memphis. I do 
not so much as know where Memphis is. I 
did not suppose that anybody in Memphis had 
ever heard my name. Do you really think it 
was in the newspapers ? ” 

For Sybil Knox still had that exaggerated 
sense of the importance of the newspaper, 
which people are apt to have, who have lived 
in Europe. 

“Oh, my dear child, you take it quite too 
seriously. Suppose it had been in the news- 
paper ? Suppose that the newspaper had said 
that you had set fire to Atherton, and that 
Atherton was burned down ? This would not 
have been a nine days’ wonder. Half the 
people in the world would not have seen it. 
Half the remainder would not have read 
it. Half those who read it would have for- 
gotten it. Half those who did not forget it 
would have disbelieved it. And by the time 
that the next newspaper was printed, it would 
not have been even worth the while of those 


SYBIL KNOX. 


173 


leaders of public opinion, to mention the fact 
that the facts that they communicated the 
day before were all untrue. I do not think I 
should be annoyed if it were in the news- 
paper. 

“But probably it is in the mouth and at 
the pen’s end of some first-rate letter writer. 
Who can there be within a hundred miles of 
here who would have started any such story? ” 
and for a moment there was silence. 

Sybil Knox broke it. “ Has there been any 
such story here ? Tell me that. Has anybody 
said that I have been flirting with anybody ? 
I may as well say that. Whom is there to 
flirt with except your husband and Dr. 
Moody ? ” 

“My child,” said the sympathetic lady 
again, “you are quite right there. How 
could you flirt where there is nobody to flirt 
with ? That is one of the minor advantages 
of New England life at this time. Every boy 
goes to Yokohama or to Duluth or to Callao 
before he is seventeen years old, and the 
women are left to flirt with each other. In 
this town we have had no man but Tom G-rin- 


174 


SYBIL KNOX. 


nell, who is crazy, and Ethan Allen’s grand- 
nephew’s brother-in-law, who is in the poor- 
house, and Dr. Moody, as you say, and poor 
Horace Fort. We have had nobody else to 
flirt with for years.” 

As she said the last words her voice wavered, 
and Mrs. Knox knew that it wavered. Mrs. 
Carrigan felt it, too, and her face flushed ; so 
that, instead of answering this jesting speech 
as she would have done, Sybil Knox said, 
“ What are you thinking of? What do you 
mean ? ” 

“Murder will out, my dear. I had forgot- 
ten it entirely ; but the flrst day that you 
were in Atherton, Horace Fort came into your 
parlor in his shirt-sleeves.” 

“To be sure he did,” said Sybil Knox, 
“and if nobody ever taught him manners be- 
fore, he got a lesson from me which I do not 
think he forgot. Anyway, I have seen Horace 
Fort but twice from that day to this day. 
And on neither of them did he ask me to 
marry him, and on neither of them did I go 
to the altar with him, as your friends of 
the newspapers say. You do not think that 


SYBIL KNOX. 


175 


I am Mrs. Horace Fort without knowing 
it?” 

Mrs. Carrigan laughed, and it was an un- 
constrained laugh. Still she said, “You are 
so quick, you saw that my voice broke when 
I spoke his name. It must be confessed that, 
in the two weeks after your arrival here, Ather- 
ton talked, in the select society of the place, of 
your old school acquaintance with Horace 
Fort.” 

“ This is what they meant,” said poor Sybil, 
“ when they told me at Rome that I could not 
live in Atherton, or in any other country town, 
for three months. I did not believe them. 
At the worst, I supposed that such talk would 
handle the dresses I wore, or the subjects I 
talked about. I did not think that I was 
actually going to have my name changed 
for me without being consulted.” 

“Do not be too hard on us,” said Mrs. Car- 
rigan. “I must say you have been worse 
treated than ever I was. I believe they did 
say that my grandfather was a Tory and tried 
to betray George Washington to be hanged by 
somebody. But before they had got that story 


176 


SYBIL KNOX. 


well started, it turned out that my grandfather 
was a pirate and had been himself hanged at 
Tyburn or somewhere else ; and before I could 
look up the executions of the last century they 
doubted whether I had any grandfather. But 
I never gave Atherton the credit for this, and 
after a little I settled down into a staid inhabi- 
tant of the place, and I get along here quite 
as well as I should get along in Washington 
or in Rome.” 

Mrs. Knox hardly listened to this rather ex- 
aggerated talk of her friend, who was really 
only trying to divert her. “Do not let us 
bother ourselves about how it happened,” she 
said. “What in the world am I to do to con- 
tradict it ? Shall I ask Colonel Carrigan to 
put a notice in the newspapers to say that 
Sybil Knox has not been married and does 
not propose to be ? ” 

“My dear child,” said her friend again, 
“my husband says he does nothing. He has 
been in public life now, as you know, for 
nearly forty years. He says he has never 
replied to anything in that time, and he has 
found that a good rule. He puts all anony- 


SYBIL KNOX. 


177 


mous letters into the fire without reading 
them ; he does not look at the marked news- 
papers which ill-natured people send to him ; 
and if anybody in the Legislature says he is a 
swindler and a murderer, he does not call at- 
tention to that remark by bringing proof that 
it is untrue. I think that his rule will be a 
good enough rule for you.” 

And with such half-way comfort did poor 
Sybil Knox return to entertain her young- 
friends. 




CHAPTER XVI. 

RS. CARRIGAN had assumed a lighter 



-i_T_L tone than her friend^ expected, and it 
represented much less than she felt. For Mrs. 
Knox had more than once spoken of the dan- 
ger of gossip in such life as theirs. “ She has 
it on the brain,” Jane Carrigan had said, “and 
it is a shame that some snobbish, travelling 
fool, who knows as little of New England as I 
know of Thibet, should have frightened her.” 
More than once she had resolutely declared to 
Mrs. Knox that the gossip of Atherton was as 
harmless — nay, as infrequent — as that of 
Washington or of Paris. And now, in the 
face of such declarations, here was her friend 
wounded — and no wonder — wounded by a 
story which would make her think that 
AthertoA was another Little Pedlington or 
Eatonsville. 

She took' a night to sleep over the story, as 
Sybil Knox had done. She said nothing of it 


178 


SYBIL KNOX. 


179 


to her husband nor to the council of her chil- 
dren. But the next morning, when her dinner 
was ordered and her maids encouraged for the 
day, when she had had a chat with her 
butcher, had said something pleasant to Mrs. 
Peth, who brought round fresh corn and Lima 
beans, had praised Cephas Gershom, who came 
with the eggs, had consulted Oliver about the 
weather, when he brought her a string of fish, 
after she had been recalled to the side door 
twice to say how many quarts of berries she 
would have from the Ames children, and to 
thank Mrs. Coram, who had stopped with a 
fine bunch of cardinal flowers, she retired to 
her own room, called Florence, her oldest 
daughter, and sat at her davenport. Florence 
came, looking a little frightened. She knew 
that something was the matter, and she and 
her sister Maria had vainly tried to guess what. 
Her mother told her briefly, but with incisive 
indignation. 

Florence was quite as angry as her mother 
could wish. Here is the advantagfe of taking 
youth into one’s counsels — you are sure of 
sympathy, and it does not hesitate in its ex- 


180 


SYBIL KNOX. 


pressions. But it was clear enough, that Flor- 
ence was taken by surprise as much as her 
mother. She expressed bitter and hot indig- 
nation. But she did not pretend even to 
guess where that indignation should fall. 

“No,” said her mother, after a little; “I 
do not see that we can do anything; If I 
asked your father he would say I could do 
nothing. I do not think I can. All the same 
I am going to tell the girls. It will be a warn- 
ing another time. And I know I can rely on 
them.” 

Florence’s face flushed with pleasure. “I 
am so glad you say that : I wanted to propose 
it, but I did not dare do it.” 

“No,” said her mother; “and nobody but 
you and I would dare to do it.” Then, after 
a pause, she added fondly, “Nobody knows 
the girls as well as you and I do. We will at 
least have the pleasure of seeing that there are 
nine women in Atherton who are not fools, 
even if they are women. And our secret will 
not burn us to death, if the others help us 
throw back the coals into the fireplace.” 

So Mrs. Carrigan took from her desk a quire 


SYBIL KWOX. 


181 


of paper stamped with a silver cross and the 
words Send Me. She wrote this note : 

Dear Huldah : It is I who want you this 
afternoon if you can come. Thimble. 

Truly yours, 

The Chief. 

Of this note she made two copies ; Florence 
made three, all directed to different young 
friends. But Mrs. Carrigan signed all, and with 
her own hand made a Maltese cross at the bot- 
tom, and wrote the letters I. H. N. The six 
notes went to the post-olQce at once, and so each 
of these girls received her summons when the 
day’s mail came up, the arrival of which was 
the event of the day for every one in Atherton. 

And each girl reported in the afternoon with 
her thimble. The order of “Send Me” is an 
order of women, of which the several societies 
number five in some places and fifty in others. 
It means work and not play, and its members 
are pledged to go where they are sent, if the 
Grand Master seems to need their services. 
The girls were punctual at Mrs. Carrigan’ s. 


182 


SYBIL KNOX. 


and they masked, sufficiently well, their curios- 
ity as to the cause of the summons. More 
than one of them had given up some promis- 
ing plan for personal pleasure, that she might 
come. 

“We will finish the flannels for the dispen- 
sary,” their hostess said, so soon as she had 
welcomed the last comer, and as they had all 
sung a hymn. “ Huldah, dear, give me that 
petticoat. I had it last week, and I can talk 
better when I sew.” 

Then she told to them in substance what she 
had told to Florence. She did not pledge 
them to secrecy. She knew perfectly well that 
no word si^oken in that room would be re- 
peated elsewhere, if by any possibility it could 
give any pain to any one, and that nothing 
said here would be repeated for the mere sake 
of talking. These fine young women had not 
been under her eye in Sunday School, in sum- 
mer amusement and in winter study, and es- 
pecially in the somewhat serious talk and 
work of “Send Me,” without her feeling sure 
that she could trust them as she would trust 
herself. “And now, girls,” she said, “ I have 


SYBIL KNOX. - 


183 


sent for you because I do not want to suifer as 
much mortification as I have suffered since this 
time yesterday, without telling my best friends 
of my sufferings.” And here she had from 
each a tender, perhaps a tearful, smile, and, 
from each of the two girls who sat next her, 
the touch of a hand interrupted the somewhat 
perfunctory stitching of the flannel. “Yes, 
dear girls, I was sure of your sympathy. I 
knew that a good object-lesson like this would 
help us in our determination to keep oiir 
tongues clean ; but I did not think we needed 
that. I did think, besides this, that perhaps 
we might find out something, and do some- 
thing to check this mischief. Does any one 
of you know anybody in Memphis ? Can any 
of you guess if Atherton has a private corre- 
spondence there?” 

No ; none of the girls could do that. But 
Laura said, with a certain simplicity which 
was especially her own, “I had just as lief ask 
Mrs. Edwards if she has any friends there.” 

They all laughed. For every one of the 
nine — Mrs. Carrigan, her two daughters, and 
the rest of the order — knew that the first step 


184 


SYBIL KNOX. 


in this bit of annoying gossip was taken by 
Mrs. Edwards, when she reported Horace 
Fort’s presence in the Atherton house. And 
every one believed that this same Mrs. Ed- 
wards had done, for this poor, naked little 
anecdote, other things in the way of providing 
for its growth, and of clothing it and setting it 
on its travels. 

They all laughed. But Jane was the first to 
speak, and she spoke seriously. “Poor Mrs. 
Edwards ! You will not find her.” 

“Where is she ? ” 

“ She has gone to Montpelier.” 

“Montpelier! She told me she expected 
friends, those Chisholm girls from Painted 
Post.” 

“Ido not know whether they are coming. 
I know she has gone to Montpelier. She came 
to see my father about it.” 

“About what?” Then Jane looked, as if 
to ask permission from the president of the 
order. Mrs. Carrigan repeated the question, 
and Jane took this as permission from her chief 
to go on. 

“ Her son is in jail, waiting a meeting of the 


SYBIL KNOX. 


185 


grand jury. She came to my father to ask 
him to give bail for him ; and he went with 
her yesterday morning. But, of course, I said 
nothing. It must be in the paper by this 
time.” 

And then it appeared that this poor Mrs. 
Edwards, who had started the Horace Fort 
story, had started one story too many. This 
boy of hers had been at home on the Fourth of 
July, and he had talked, in his grand way, 
about what the firm was doing, and what the 
cashier of the bank said, and what the teller 
replied, and what the president had done. 
And Mrs. Edwards repeated much more than 
she understood, very much more than she 
knew. The same Eussian scandal, which had 
married Sybil Knox, had now made so much of 
this story that the bank commissioner had 
pounced on the bank itself, when no one ex- 
pected him. Nothing was the matter, prob- 
ably, but officials and all were made angry, 
and the only result of the investigation had 
been that this boy Jairus and his employers 
had been called to account for certain transac- 
tions of the head of the firm, who was at this 


186 


SYBIL KNOX. 


moment in Oregon. The boy had contra- 
dicted himself in his cross-examination before 
the magistrate, which was, indeed, very cross, 
and now he had been arrested on a charge of 
perjury. 

All which was due directly to Mrs. Edwards’s 
improvement of one of the boy’s braggadocio 
stories. He had, alas ! been brought up in 
the habits of his mother. He had told some 
things he had seen, and some wdiich he had 
guessed. His mother had repeated these to 
friends of her own sort, who had repeated 
them with advantage to theirs. The story 
had then fallen into the hands of one of the 
“reportorial staff” of the Spread Eagle, who 
was engaged in reporting a base-ball game at 
Atherton. He was also a “ space writer ” for a 
“ Metropolitan Journal,” one of those papers 
which tell you that the Emperor William has 
been impressed by what the Notary Public 
has said about his Catholic policy, and has 
taken its advice. 

Among them all a fine story had been got up 
for the benefit of as honest a set of directors 
as you could find in Vermont, which is to say 


SYBIL KNOX. 


187 


in the world. The bank commissioner had 
done his duty promptly, and the upshot of it 
all was, that Master Jairus Edwards now had 
an opportunity to lament his indiscretions, 
and to relate his adventures, within the four 
walls of a jail. 

Mrs. Carrigan drew these particulars from 
Jane, so far as she knew them, only by the 
closest cross-examination. So soon as she 
knew the facts she said, ‘‘ I am so glad I made 
you come here, my poor child. For, with Mrs. 
Edwards away, 1 should not have known this 
for a week. Are you sure about the bonds- 
men ? Do they not want two ? I should do 
for one. I hold real estate of my own. Or 
my husband would, I know. Do you girls go 
on with the sewing. He has just come home, 
and I will ask him.” 

And then in five minutes she was back again. 
Jones had been sent with a telegram to Mr. Grey 
at Montj)elier to say that Mr. Carrigan would 
give bonds for Jairus Edwards, if he were 
needed. 

‘^So that matter is out of the way,” said 
Mrs. Carrigan, as she came back to the party. 


188 


SYBIL KNOX. 


“Jane, dear, I am proud of my god-child. I 
wish I had as steady a head, or could tell a 
story as well as you, without telling a word 
too much, or without telling it when I ought 
to hold my tongue. 

“ Sad, though, is it not, that this innocent 
word ‘ story,’ a history, should, with even 
little girls, come to mean a ‘ lie ’ ? Do not the 
children now hold up their hands and say, 
‘ Oh, what a story ! ’ What can Oscar Wilde 
mean by ‘ the Decay of Lying ’ ? 

“Do you know what Dr. Stearns told me? 
He says that the old fathers used ‘fabula’ and 
‘fabulare,’ our words for ‘fable’ and ‘to tell 
a fable,’ when they were talking about the 
histories in the Bible. He says it is only by a 
steady law of decline that a fable comes to be 
something untrue.” 

“ As gests came to be jests — something real 
to be something said for fun.” 

“Why, yes; exactly so. ‘Behold how 
great a matter a little fire kindleth ! And the 
tongue is a fire.’ Girls, we will have that as a 
part of the ritual of ‘ Send Me,’ to read that 
passage.” And she took down her Testament 


SYBIL KNOX. 


189 


and made Hiildah read the sixth verse of the 
third chapter of James, and the verses which 
follow. 

“ But we did not come together to take care 
of Jairus Edwards, though we seem to have 
been sent about that business. You came here 
to comfort me in my distress. That you have 
done. But, seriously, I called you to see if w'e 
could do anything about it. Mr. Carrigan 
says that what he calls an ‘ overt act ’ does a 
person in trouble more good, than all the 
respectful sympathy in the world which does 
not express itself. In fact, my husband has a 
great contempt for people ‘ who cannot express 
themselves.’ I never say a w'ord myself, so 
that I do not always agree with him. Bdt, 
simply, I feel as if I should die if I could not 
make poor Sybil feel more comfortably about 
this nonsense. Why, girls, you cannot think 
how sensitive she is, and how much it worries 
her. And those hateful old Roman women 
had told her it would be so before she came 
here— Messalina, and Agrippina, and Lucrezia 
Borgia, and all the rest of them. I hate them, 
and I always did ! ” 


190 


SYBIL KNOX. 


The girls laughed heartily at her inability 
in the arts of expression, and Maria, repeating 
one of their old jokes, said, “How fortunate 
it is that no one can say anything about 
us ! ” 

There had been three wonderful maiden 
ladies, whose “united ages,” as the newspa- 
pers say, were seven hundred and seventy- 
seven years ; they were the very oldest people 
in the world. Their deeds and their sayings 
had supplied Atherton Avith its small-talk for 
centuries ; when, one fine afternoon, one of 
them was heard to ask, “ What can anybody 
find to say about us ? ” 

There was a moment’s silence now, broken 
by little Mildred Dawes, who said, “Dear 
chief, you know my father is going to take me 
to Denver ; I will ask him to stop at Memphis 
a day, if that will do any good.” 

This was so exactly like Mildred that the 
girls would have all said that they knew it was 
coming. They would not have knowm the de- 
tail ; but, in general, she was always thinking 
of something good-natured she could do — nay, 
more than good-natured, of something where 


SYBIL KNOX. 


191 


she could go out of her way to help some other 
girl on hers. 

“No,” said Huldah, more discreet, “for 
Memphis is only an accident. He was there 
when he heard it ; that is all. If only dear 
Mrs. Knox could understand that very few 
people ever heard it, that nobody believed it, 
and that everybody has forgotten it.” 

“Exactly!” said Mrs. Carrigan. “I am 
glad to see the good sense of ninety on those 
shoulders of twenty. Not in vain were you 
named Huldah if that means the wise.” 

“As it does not,” said Huldah, laughing, 
“ we cannot put a notice into the personal col- 
umn of the Eagle, can we, to say, ‘ Mrs. Sybil 
Knox, who has lately arrived at the ancestral 
seat in Atherton, has not changed her name 
and does not mean to ; ’ and then send that 
marked to Mr. Condor. Can we, Mrs. Car- 
rigan 1 ’ ’ 

“ His name is Coodair, my dear,” said that 
lady, who had only heard poor John Coudert’s 
rather unusual name. 

“We could not kill that whipper-snapper 
who edits the personal column, could we ? I 


192 


SYBIL KNOX. 


saw him at the picnic ; he wears a gold chain 
and a satin vest and a loud necktie and patent- 
leather shoes?” This was Laura’s question. 
“I do not mean ‘could we.’ I could in a 
minute with this hair-pin, and I would gladly, 
but for a shudder as to what would happen to 
him. I mean ‘ might one,’ under the laws and 
constitution of Vermont? I am sure they told 
us something at school about prompt action in 
the suppression of nuisances.” 

“ Dear child, le mieux est V ennemi du hon. 
It is a cynical maxim, but often states the 
Philistine practical consideration for the hour. 
Atherton is not an ideal town, though Ver- 
mont is well-nigh an ideal State. We are here 
to consider, not what could be if we were 
angels in Paradise, but what we can do about 
it on this particular day of the week.” 

“ If we were angels in Paradise I would wear 
light sandals, instead of boots with heels.” 

“I would have my skirts shorter.” 

“ Would you have your wings white or rain- 
bow-color ? Now, that petticoat would be much 
more welcome at the dispensary if it were all 
the colors of the bow,” 


SYBIL KNOX. 


193 


“Colors of the pit, more likely. That is 
where all these aniline colors come from.” 

“ Descend, dear angels, descend from these 
heights to consider daily duty. We can snub 
every one who talks about the Knox house or 
its affairs.” 

“ Dear aunty, they are tired of that al- 
ready.” 

“ So much the better, my dear. Can we not 
start them on something else ? ” 

“On the fall of Constantinople?” asked 
Hatty, laughing. She had not spoken before. 

“ Yes ; if nothing better turns up.” 

“Mrs. President,” said Hatty more seri- 
ously, “I move that Mrs. Sybil Knox be in- 
vited to take the silver cross, and to join Order 
No. 73 of ‘Send Me.’” 

“I second that motion,” said Mary Stiles. 

Mrs. Carrigan paused for a moment, as if to 
invite debate. She paused so long that the 
girls who had made and seconded the motion 
did not know if she approved of it. But when 
she spoke it was to say, “Dear girls, you are 
wiser than I am, though perhaps you do not 
know it. One way is to stop gossip ; another 


194 


SYBIL KNOX. 


way is not to listen. The Sirens could stop 
singing, or the sailors could put wax and 
cotton in their ears. If this dear lady were 
only in a tearing eagerness about some round 
peg which will not go into a square hole, she 
would forget Horace Fort and Mr. Coodair 
and herself — perhaps would even forget to 
look at her mail ; and that state I take to be 
the Kingdom of Heaven. 

“For there ought to be a marginal reading, 
at least, in the Bible, where it says that about 
the angels, to add in italics, “ they neither 
receive a mail nor answer letters.” 

So Mrs. Knox was chosen a member of 
“ Send Me.” The servant announced tea, and 
it was high tea. 

“ Tea must wait, dear girls, till we have done 
the business. The doctor says that Mrs. 
Winter’s eyes will do well enough, but he will 
have Dr. Wadsworth up to operate on Monday. 
For three weeks her eyes must be bandaged. 
Some one ought to be there every morning and 
some one every afternoon. Think who can go, 
and put down the names here.” 

So the girls fell to talking in groups, and in 


SYBIL KNOX. 


195 


three minutes the list was complete, and was 
lying in business-like shape on the davenport. 

Monday morning . — Jane Gray. 

Monday afternoon . — Huldah Wadsworth. 

Tuesday morning . — Maria Carrigan. 

And so on, for the twenty-one days of poor 
Mrs. Winter’s confinement. 

This chapter must end with the reply to 
John Coudert’s letter : 

Atherton, August 17. 
Dear Mr. Coudert: 

I was glad to see your hand- writing, though 
I w'as more amazed, amused, and provoked than 
I will try to tell you by the ridiculous story 
which you had heard at Memphis, but which 
had never come to me. 

It must be some double of mine — some other 
Mrs. Knox — who has changed her name. Pray 
do me the favor to contradict it in the quarter 
where you heard it, or anywhere else. 

I do not know how to thank you for your 
care about our poor German friends. I do 
hope something may follow. The Frau Berlitz 
is with me, but I do not dare tell her that her 
husband is in jail. And I must thank you, 
also, for watching the Cattaraugus and Ope- 


196 


SYBIL KNOX. 


lousas. If any one can tell me what to do I 
shall be sure to do it ; for, indeed, I do not 
know. Truly yours, 

Sybil Knox. 

And the word Knox was underlined. 

This letter, written in two or three drafts, 
got itself finally copied. And then Mrs. Knox, 
who knew perfectly that her correspondent 
had said his address was to be at Pittsburg, 
for she had read his letter forty times, 
addressed him at Memphis. The letter went 
to the Dead Letter Office, and was never seen 
by him or by her. 


CHAPTER XVIL 


J OHN COUDERT was disappointed, more 
than lie liked to own to liimself, that he re- 
ceived no word from Mrs. Knox. It would be 
fair to add, perhaps, that, as the summer and 
autumn passed, Mrs. Knox was as much disap- 
pointed that she had no second letter from 
him. In such matters a man is not apt to have 
a confidant. Certainly he had none. Indeed, 
his life had so ordered itself that he had few 
near friends anywhere. And, while the public 
trusts which he held, and had held, brought 
him, in any Northern city, into companionship 
with people enough, and while his intelligence 
and spirit made him everywhere a favorite, he 
had, since his mother’s death, no real home 
anywhere ; nor was there any person with 
whom he was used either to boast of his fre- 
quent successes, to consult in his difficulties, or 
to mourn over his occasional failures. 

He owned to himself that he loitered in beau- 


197 


198 


SYBIL KNOX. 


tiful Pittsburg for two days, when his busi- 
ness might well have called him away. 
He was hoping for the arrival of this letter. 
There are charming people in Pittsburg, and 
beautiful homes. There is Mr. Carnegie’s 
library at Allegheny, which is really a part of 
Pittsburg, and a man might find himself 
waiting in many worse places, for a letter from 
the woman whom he loved. John Coudert did 
his best, with such resources, to make the 
time go by ; but he could not make a letter 
come to Pittsburg which had been directed to 
Memphis ; and on the third day he girded up 
his loins for the battle, for which he had now 
prepared himself, with the arch-enemy of the 
Cattaraugus and Opelousas Railroad. He fol- 
lowed the rule which his friends said had 
governed him in all his successes, and struck 
high. 

The C. & O. Road, as all the world knows, is 
not in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately for him, 
it does not pass through two States, or he could 
have tried the chances, respectable, if doubtful, 
of the Interstate Commission. As it was, he 
knew he must turn to the State authorities in 


SYBIL KNOX. 


199 


tlie State where his little line tried to maintain 
an independent existence. He fortified him- 
self with a letter of introduction to the gov- 
ernor, and took such a train that he might 
arrive at Franklin, the capital, and make his 
first visit early in the day. He promised him- 
self a good deal of interest in this visit. Gov- 
ernor Needham’s name had been known 
through the whole country by the courage of 
his canvass and its bitterness. By some arts 
or methods, variously accounted for, according 
as you rate the infallibility of a Blue journal 
or a Green, he had reversed the great decision 
of the last presidential election, and had 
carried the State for himself and his party by a 
sweeping m^^ity. If you believed the Green 
infallibles he was the lowest and most de- 
graded criminal in the State. When he was 
not drunk, he was at the card-table, according 
to the Greens. His unscrupulous conduct of 
his business had enriched him, or, as the ele- 
gant Green phrase was, had filled his barrel,” 
and, according to Hie Greens, his free use of 
this barrel had purchased the suffrages of a 
community of utter purity, who had judged 


200 


SYBIL KNOX. 


everytliing, only two years before, by tlie 
bigliest standards. The Blues, on the other 
hand, were not in the least surprised at “Ned 
Needham’s” success. Tliey ascribed it to a 
certain bonTiomie of his bearing with hotel 
clerks and railroad porters. They had from 
the first pointed out to the world that if his 
party would name “jolly Ned Needham” as 
its candidate, and would set aside the longer 
experience of Governor Vinton,* or the tried 
statesmanship of Secretaiy Macon, all would 
be well. And as the party had taken their 
counsel, and had named Ned Needham, of 
course he was chosen. Such, severely con- 
densed, were the two notions with regard to 
this gentleman, which were presented to the 
nation by the newspapers. For his election 
was really a matter of national importance. 
And every intelligent man had reason to be 
curious about the cause of what implied, per- 
haps, a revolution in national politics. 

As for John Coudert, he was a man of too 
much sense and experience to place the slightest 
confidence in either statement or estimate. 
He knew perfectly well that the people of this 


SYBIL KNOX. 


201 


State never chose a fool to govern it. And 
he did not believe that they had chosen a 
knave. But he was very curious to know what 
manner of man had achieved a victory so re- 
markable. 

The State House stood in a beautiful garden, 
laid out and maintained with care, which was, 
apparently, a sort of lounging place for the 
people of the town. Fountains were playing, 
and seats under trees accommodated nurse- 
maids, while children played with their horses 
and wagons on the gravel. A janitor, in the 
great marble hall which occupied most of the 
lower floor, directed Coudert up to the gov- 
ernor’s room. He had little time to examine 
the great paintings between which he passed, 
but that question crossed his mind, as it often 
does in such places : by what throw of a dice-box 
is it that one of such pictures shall be a master- 
piece of art, and the picture opposite be abso- 
lutely absurd in drawing and in color? Once 
at the head of the great stairway, he found a 
negro, sitting at a little writing table and 
reading a novel. Coudert gave him his card, 
and asked him to take it to the governor, with 


202 


SYBIL KNOX. 


the note of introduction which he had received 
from Judge Pringle. This was the only cere- 
mony of introduction to the governor of a State 
larger than Bavaria or Holland. Coudert re- 
membered, with a certain amusement, his pres- 
entation to Leopold at Brussels the last year. 

In a moment the janitor returned with a 
young man who proved to be one of the 
governor’s private secretaries, and who asked 
Mr. Coudert to come in. They passed through 
a large empty room, which the young man 
said was the Council Chamber, and so came into 
Governor Needham’s private parlor. He rose 
from his desk, crossed half-way to the door, 
took Coudert’ s hand, and led him to a chair. 
He was tall, rather delicate in aspect, with an 
elegant bearing ; his features were finely cut, 
and he carried an aspect of care, almost 
amounting to anxiety, curious in a man so 
young. He wore a light linen jacket, for the 
day was one of those tremendously hot days of 
early September. But in this detail, and in 
every other detail, his costume was faultless. 
Such were Mr. Coudert’ s first, quick observa- 
tions. 


SYBIL KNOX. 


203 


He felt at once a certain charm in the gover- 
nor’s manner — the cordiality of a gentleman 
to a stranger, curiously mixed with the 
dignity of a man who was representing a 
State, and showing, at the same time, an in- 
terest ifP knowing whether the stranger had 
come merely to ‘‘do the town,” or upon some 
errand of real importance. He asked, with 
evident respect and interest, after Judge 
Pringle, whose letter he still held in his hand, 
and then paused, with that air which says, “It 
is your turn now ; remember that we are all 
busy here, and tell your story as quickly as 
you can.” 

Coudert knew his own country well enough 
to have known, as he came up the steps of the 
grand staircase, that he was not going to speak 
to any second-rate person. But he felt a cer- 
tain sense of relief — the feeling as if his battle 
were already half won — when he looked into 
the open face and saw the resolute expression 
of the governor. He told him, in severely con- 
densed narrative, for which his long journey 
had given him hours to prepare, why he was 
in Franklin. He spoke of the arch-enemy — 


204 


SYBIL KNOX. 


not Satan, but that son of Satan who was try- 
ing to wreck the railroad — as if all men knew 
his character and his purpose. He spoke as 
yon might speak of the cholera, of a cyclone, 
or of Satan himself. He observed that “Hed 
Needham” did not intimate, by the quiver of 
an eye-lash, whether he accepted this view of 
the man or rejected it. 

He closed his story by saying, “I have come 
to you because I am used to begin at the top. 
I know you have thought of this iniquit}^ 
You may know how it is to be beaten. I do 
not. I wish I did. But I am here to say 
that, if you know, and if the State wants to do 
anything, here am I. Send me, if you choose. 
In a fashion, I represent the lambs — the stock- 
holders and the bond-holders, ‘ the widows and 
orphans,’ as you say in legislatures — who are 
pushed to and fro as the baccarat counters in 
this thing.” 

“Jolly Ned Needham” heard him from 
beginning to end, without a syllable, without 
smile or frown, and without even that quiver 
of an eye-lash. He looked Coudert in the face 
without winking, or turning his eye for an 


SYBIL KNOX. 


205 


instant. Coudert did the same by him. 
When his statement was finished, for half a 
minute there was silence. 

Then the governor said, You are the Mr. 
Coudert who represented New York at the In- 
ternational ? ” 

John Coudert said he was. 

‘‘ I thought so. Featherstone, whom you met 
there, is my brother-in-law. He told me about 
you. I have always wanted to know you.’’ 
Then he paused again. ‘‘Mr. Coudert, I do 
not know what you believe, but I think your 
visit is providential. Will you look at this 
letter which I had just begun, to my attorney- 
general ? ” And from his desk he handed 
him the sheet on which he had been writing. 


My Dear Scarlett: 

This Opelousas thing must be straightened, 
if we all swing for it. I am not governor of 
this State in vain. I know that he who fights 
the devil needs long tongs. I do not know the 
length of mine, but I do know what my grip is 
when I take hold. Now, tell me three things : 

First. Is there, or is there not, law 
enough 


206 


SYBIL KNOX. 


And this was as far as he had written. • ‘‘ j. 
had come so far,” he said, smiling with that 
exquisite smile which would have led almost 
any woman to worship him, but with his face 
still as firm, not to say as relentless, as if he 
had been Hildebrand. “I will tell you what 
I was going to say.” 

And then he plunged into the ins and outs 
of the iniquity. He discussed legal and con- 
stitutional questions as if he had been speak- 
ing before the full bench at Washington, and 
with full confidence that Coudert followed 
him in the finest speculation and by the most 
delicate deduction. He went over the ground 
which the common law gave them ; he gave 
Coudert just a hint, but enough of detail, to 
show what their own courts had ruled, and 
how far their own statutes had gone ; and he 
cited, as if they had been the Ten Command- 
ments, the few recent decisions, all too few, of 
the English and American courts on matters 
akin to those in hand. “I had even thought 
of proceeding by quo warranto^''' he said. 
“What my number three would have been, in 
this letter, was to ask if we could not bring 


SYBIL KNOX. 


207 


before our Supreme Court, sitting in equity, 
all three of the corporations — yours, poor 
lambs,” and again he smiled, “and these your 
two enemies — and ask them all, in brief, to 
tell the people of this country what in thunder 
they are doing, and what reason there is ‘ why 
sentence of death should not be pronounced 
on them.’ Quo warranto has its uses, though 
it has never been ovei'-popular, Mr. Coudert.” 

John Coudert could venture to smile now. 
And he told the other how far he had gone in 
the same lines. He had the best counsel in 
Wall Street and in Philadelphia ; but, alas ! 
their plans did not agree with each other. 
“But you will be glad to see the opinion I 
have from Thayer and from Wirt, for it is'pre- 
cisely your own. They are both retained for 
me. But if you could, and if this State would, 
appear distinctly in the conduct of this inquiry, 
of course we should ask nothing better, and 
we should leave the whole in such good hands. 
Only ” and he paused. 

“ Only ?” asked the governor, with that air 
of a man used to hear the whole without re- 


serve. 


208 


SYBIL KNOX. 


“Only I was wishing that you were your 
own attorney-general, or your own chief- 
justice.” 

“Better as it is, as you will say when you 
know them both. I have been asking myself 
now whether a simple grand jury inquest, to 
try your arch- devil as conspiring in a case of 
arson with this little devil in the House of 
Correction, might not be the shorter way. 
Yes, I see you have no testimony to speak of. 
But there are two verdicts. There is the ver- 
dict of a petty jury in Butler County* which 
may go either way it chooses. There is the 
other verdict of Public Opinion, Mr. Coudert; 
and by Jove ! if we can find him guilty there 
this country shall be too hot to hold him, and 
he shall finish his days in Fiji Land. That 
may be the best way. 

“I will tell you, Mr. Coudert; let me tele- 
phone the attorney-general to lunch with us. 
We shall only have Mrs. Needham and the 
boys. One of my aids here shall take you to 
see the Cascades and the Museum in the mean- 
time. You are at the St. Clair? Yes? I will 
call for you at one ten and take you home 


SYBIL KNOX. _ 209 

with me. Meanwhile Miss Francis and I will 
finish this stuff.” He did not so much as wait 
for the other to accept his hospitalities. The 
janitor came in. “Ask Miss Francis to come 
in, and Mr. Willis. Mr. Willis, have the 
goodness to telephone to Colonel Wayne to 
come over. Here is the Tribune^ Mr. Coudert, 
and the World. Now, Miss Francis, if you 
please,” and he began reeling off his letters to 
the stenographer, who had come in. When, in 
a moment. Colonel Wayne came in, he only 
paused long enough to say, “Colonel, you w'ill 
be glad to know Mr. Coudert. It is John 
Coudert, you know.” And the gentlemen 
shook hands. “ Mr. Coudert lunches with us. 
Try to amuse and edify him till then. Show 
him the serpent-mounds and the cascades, and 
everything else that will make him comfort- 
able. Does Campbell sit to-day ?” 

The colonel said no, that the court had ad- 
journed over a week. 

“ I am sorry for that : I wanted yon should 
see Campbell. Well, Wayne, see that you 
exalt the city in his eyes, and make ns glorious. 
He may write a book, you know. Good-morn- 


210 


SYBIL KNOX. 


ing. At one ten sharp, Mr. Condert.” And 
they parted. And again Condert remembered 
that reception by the King of Belgium, and 
his farewell bow there. ' Before they were out 
of the room the governor was dictating again : 
“cannot be supposed to imply,” and so on, 
and so on, in that dreary business of working 
off the day’s mail. 


CHAPTER XVIII. 


^ nine minutes after one, John Coudert 



jL\. took his place in the great crowd of 
loafers and travellers who sat in the shady 
piazza of the St. Clair, saying but little to 
each other, but watching doggedly the gigantic 
thermometer on the druggist’s shop opposite, 
as its red column rose higher and higher. 

At exactly ten minutes past one. Governor 
Needham drove up to the steps of the piazza. 
He was in a light covered buggy, driving a 
pair of beautiful horses. A groom, waiting 
under the piazza, started forth to take the 
horses. 

“Thank you, Nathan, no ; there is a gentle- 
man here ” and at this moment John Cou- 

dert presented himself, would not permit the 
other to leave the carriage, as he tried to do, 
mounted himself, and they were off. But, as 
Coudert could not help seeing, in the dozen 
seconds necessary for this, his companion had 


212 


SYBIL KNOX. 


recognized, by nod or glance, half a dozen of 
the men, who had pressed forward to speak to 
him. He hardly spoke to anybody, but, still, it 
seemed to each man that he was the one person 
in the whole number whom the governor 
was particularly glad to see. In a moment a 
gossamer lap-robe was drawn over their knees, 
and the handsome bays were taking them up 
the broad, asphalt-paved Franklin Avenue, 
which is the meridian from and on which 
the latitude and longitude streets of that cap- 
ital are measured. 

“It is easy to see why they call you ‘jolly 
Ned Needham,’ ” said John Coudert. 

The governor laughed as he said, “What 
stuff they write and talk ! I do not suppose a 
man or wojpan believes them. Why should 
not a fellow speak or nod in a good-natured 
way to everybody? Are we not each other’s 
keepers ? Where in thunder should I be now, 
or you, if somebody had not shod these horses, 
if somebody had not groomed them, if some- 
body had not raised the corn they ate this 
morning ? For my part, I am very glad I did 
not have to do these things, or to clean the 


SYBIL KKOX. 


213 


harness. I had to do it in my day. My 
fathet, who was a man of sense, swore that I 
should never ride a horse, or drive one, though 
there were twenty in his stables, unless I could 
groom him and harness him. I valued much 
more my certificate from old Dennis, the sta- 
ble-man, than I did my Bachelor of Arts 
diploma. So, as I say, I am really very much 
obliged to the people who do those things for 
me. I know I could do it for one of them if 
the tide turned that way.” 

Then he paused a minute and went on : 
“The manners of a country where everybody 
feels the mutual dependence will always be 
different from the manners of a country gov- 
erned from the top. For my part, I think they 
are better manners. 

“And that, Mr. Coudert, is the whole of 
what the newspapers mean when they talk of 
‘ jolly Ned Needham,’ or of the ‘ well-affected 
affability of the governor.’ In truth, I never 
asked a man to drink, for I do not know the 
taste of whiskey or beer ; and so I never of- 
fended any other man by not asking him.” 

The governor’s house was, perhaps, two 


214 


SYBIL KNOX. 


miles from the State House, large and com- 
fortable, surrounded with “ a shrubbery which 
Shenstone might have envied” — if anybody 
knows Avhat that means — and fairly covered 
with climbing roses.and honeysuckles and vines 
of clematis, still in bloom, with wistaria in its 
second bloom. A bright boy, whom Mr. Need- 
ham called Harry, one of his sons, came run- 
ning out as the bays stopped, and himself drove 
them to the stable. Mrs. Needham was at the 
door to welcome them. ‘ ‘ Mr. Scarlett is here,” 
she said, “and lam so much obliged to you 
for bringing Mr. Coudert. Is not Mrs. Cou- 
dert with you ?” she said, as she gave him her 
hand, without even asking an introduction. 

Coudert had to explain that there was no 
Mrs. Coudert, and never had been ; he did not 
so far go into the dark chambers as to add that 
there never would be. Mrs. Needham asked 
him if he would go to his room, asked her hus- 
band when Mr. Coudert’ s trunk would come, 
and, in general, took it for granted that he had 
“come to stay,” as the fine national proverb 
puts it. He was himself inwardly surprised 
that she knew him so well, but in a minute it 


SYBIL KNOX. 


215 


appeared that there was a telephone between 
the governor’s office and his house, and that 
he had “called up” his wife, to tell her who 
her guests would be. 

Precisely at half-past one a tidy girl an- 
nounced lunch. Coudert observed that she 
spoke to her mistress in German, and that 
Mrs. Needham replied in the same language. 
They gathered at a table elegantly furnished, 
in a large airy dining-room, and Coudert, who 
had been going through the horrors of the fly- 
season at crowded hotels, noticed instantly 
that there was not one of the pests of human- 
ity in the room. He thought they were to 
talk secrets, and he saw, therefore, with some 
surprise that the elder children of the family 
gathered with them. They spoke to him 
modestly, as they were presented to him by 
their mother, and all quietly took their places 
at the table. 

In the exuberant hospitality of the valley of 
the Ohio and the Mississippi, there is but little 
distinction between what they choose to call 
lunch and what they call dinner. In fact, 
they call the same meal lunch or dinner as 


S16 


SYBIL KNOX. 


they are speaking to one or another person. 
Needham had asked his guest to “lunch,” 
because he knew he came from the East, and 
might be used to dining at six or seven o’clock. 
But in the furnishing of the table, and in its 
service, there was nothing to distinguish it 
from what the family dinner of the same house 
or the same place might have been. 

So soon as they were Avell embarked on the 
business of eating. Governor Needham said to 
Mr. Scarlett, “ Scarlett, I told you why you 
were sent for. Mr. Coudert, I am afraid, has 
not much time ; certainly you and I have not ; 
and I thought we could talk more quietly here 
than at the office. Mr. Coudert, you need not 
be afraid to say everything here ; my children 
and my wife are used to hearing secrets, and 
we can go over all these matters here and now. 
Tell Mr. Scarlett what you told me this morn- 
ing.” And then, with a little laugh, “Scar- 
lett is a better fellow than you would think, 
considering the company he keeps. He is 
attorney-general because he ran in at the head 
of his ticket.” 

And Scarlett laughed, and interrupted to 


SYBIL KNOX 


217 


say, ‘‘As the governor is governor because he 
ran in at the head of his.” 

The governor nodded and smiled, and went 
on, “Yes, that is the reason why I have one 
of these rascals of the opposition to be my 
confidential adviser in law. But Scarlett and 
I knew each other long ago. We have met 
too often on the stumj) not to be fond of each 
other, and I will not say that the machine does 
not run better because it runs on two wheels. 
Now, Scarlett, you must talk your best to this 
man. He told me this morning that he wished 
I were my own attorney-general. That is a 
high compliment, and you must make him 
understand that we can go one better than 
that.” 

It was not the first time that John Couderthad 
seen that, in the antagonisms and mysteries of 
politics, the working force is often brought for- 
ward in a way that the theorists would not 
imagine possible. Here were two men who 
had denounced each other’s parties on the 
stump, who were now thrown into co-operation 
for the benefit of a great State, and who knew 
how to co-operate. When the admiral of a 


218 


SYBIL KNOX 


fleet and the fleld-marshal of an army have 
courage and mutual respect enough to carry on 
a joint operation, that operation succeeds. 
Such mutual confidence has not often shown 
itself in war, and that is the reason why most 
wars are failures. But in the practical affairs 
of a practical people, such co-operation as had 
been brought about here has more than once 
shown what it is to live under the government 
of a people which wants to “get the best.” 

But Coudert did not stop to indulge in 
political speculation. He plunged right into 
his stoi’y, which he told with the severe brevity 
which had pleased the governor in the morn- 
ing. The attorney-general listened carefully, 
occasionally interrupted him to ask a question, 
but possessed himself of the leading facts, 
which Coudert had been working out for the 
whole summer ; particularly of the information 
he had received at the Commencement of his 
college. After the story was over, the attor- 
ney-general looked across the table to the 
governor without saying anything. 

“ ISTo,” said the governor to him, “ I am not 
going to open my plans. The responsibility 


SYBIL KNOX. 219 

of this thing will be yours. I shall probably 
never finish the note to you which I began this 
morning. I had got so far as to say that some- 
thing must be done. We owe it to the State 
that it should be done, and we owe it to the 
country. I am a governor, and I propose to 
do some governing. There are laws, and I do 
not believe that those laws are to be ridden 
rough-shod by Wall Street or any emanation 
from Wall Street. State your plans, and I 
will say whether I think they are good.” 

Thus invoked, the attorney-general went 
into the detail of the matter, somewhat as his 
chief had done in the morning. He touched, 
however, naturally enough, more upon the 
difficulties of practice, upon the proofs to be 
brought for this theory or that theory, and 
especially pointed out, with a very sharp 
probe, the Aveakest points of the story which 
Coudert had been telling. There was a great 
deal which they knew for all practical pur- 
poses, for Avhich they had not a scrap of evi- 
dence which could be put in in court. That 
the arch-devil of this transaction — call him 
Satan, Ahriman, Achitophel, or what you 


220 


SYBIL KNOX. 


would — was in league with all the enemies 
of this once well-established road, was clear 
enough. That he had suborned its officers 
right and left, that he had destroyed its repu- 
tation by every lie which he could print, was 
clear enough. That he had gone ■ so far as to 
hire one of its own men to set fire to one of its 
buildings, all three of them were sure. But 
these were a set of terrible charges, which 
must be substantiated in the face of the first 
counsel in the country, and wdiere there was 
untold wealth in the hands of the person whose 
purposes were to be unmasked. How this 
should be done was not so easy a matter. 

It was at this point, undoubtedly, that John 
Coudert’s visit was of the first value to the 
governor and to his able chief-of-staff in the 
line of law. There are many things whicli a 
person, nominally an outsider, can do, which 
cannot be thrown upon executive oificers. 
Coudert intimated that he would see to the 
voice of the press. He gave them the evidence 
that he commanded the sympathy of the large 
proprietors of the C. & 0. And they knew 
perfectly well that there were railroad mag- 


SYBIL KNOX. 


221 


nates of the first importance in the country 
who would like nothing better, were it merely 
in the cause of honor and truth, than that 
Ahriman should be fiung from his throne and 
should plunge for nine centuries through the 
abysses of darkness. Exactly how the various 
forces were to be divided in the attack which 
was to be made — this was more difficult to say. 
It was easy to see that there were forces, and 
Coudert could not have asked that those forces 
should have a better commander-in-chief than 
“jolly Ned Needham,” who was presiding so 
gracefully at his own hospitable table. 

They talked eagerly for an hour and a half, 
when the governor withdrew. He had an ap- 
pointment at three, he said, with the school 
board ; and they could see from the window 
that his horses were waiting at the door. 
“ But you are not to go, Mr. Coudert. Mrs. 
Needham will keep you as long as she can, and 
perhaps you will let her take you to drive this 
afternoon. As for Scarlett here, he is a lazy 
dog ; he never has anything to do. And he 
must decide whether to go with you and Mrs. 
Needham, or whether he will sit drinking with 


222 


SYBIL KNOX. 


tlie boys at the bar of the Tecumseh.” And 
with this final fling at his old enemy, he bade 
them good-bye. 

What really happened was, that Coudert and 
Scarlett sat smoking together for an hour on a 
shady veranda, and went backward and for- 
ward over the case in its intricacies and possi- 
bilities. Coudert ventured to express his 
sense of the chai’m which Needham had for 
him in all his bearing, and Scarlett most 
cordially seconded every word he said. 

“I have summered him and wintered him,” 
he said. ‘ ‘ He is as pure as a woman and as 
true as the gospel. And at the same time he 
has this happy-go-lucky way with him, which, 
as you know, makes everybody think that he 
is his special friend. The fellow deserves his 
popularity, if any man ever deserved it. And 
if anybody can pull you and me through in 
this fight, Mr. Coudert, it will be Ned Need- 
ham.” 


CHAPTER XIX. 


HILE the wolves were devouring the 



V Y carcass of the Cattaraugus and Ope- 
lousas Railroad, or proposing to, while the 
watch-dogs were doubting and consulting, the 
lambs who held its stock were starving. The 
simile is very badly mixed, but so were all the 
affairs of this unfortunate institution. 

Started in the very beginning, created by 
men who worked in the public interest, with 
the same motive with which in those days men 
created savings banks or other philanthropic 
institutions, the C. & O. had gone through 
many ups and many downs. But in the hands 
of a brilliant and wise director, one George 
Orcutt, the road had long ago assumed the 
commanding position which its founders had 
foreseen. In all that immense region, half the 
country was, almost of necessity, tributary to 
it. And, as has been intimated, so large and 
so conciliatory was its management, as to make 


223 


224 


SYBIL KNOX. 


friends where it might have expected enemies, 
or at leas,t rivals. George Orcutt had long 
since left this world. But the traditions he had 
established were maintained, and the present 
management, though it could claim nothing of 
his genius, or, indeed, of his spirit, and though, 
in the modern notion, it was certainly “slow- 
coach” and behind the times, was still above 
and beyond all suspicion of dishonor or of 
personal motive. 

Still, for this year, with a facility more fatal 
than that of years before, its stock fell and fell 
and fell in the market. No bull spasms af- 
fected the hardly conscious faintness of this 
dying road. How could it be otherwise, in- 
deed ? Dividend after dividend had been 
passed. Reports were less and less frequent, 
and then it was only too clear that business 
was declining. The most rigid economy of 
administration, parsimony, even, would not 
create a credit balance. It was clear enough 
that the treasurer and the directors were 
carrying on its movement from their own poc- 
kets, in a sort of pride which, for the moment, 
compelled them to keep up a losing game. 


SYBIL KNOX. 


226 


Mrs. Knox’s business agent, a kinsman in 
whom her husband had confidence, had noti- 
fied her, while she was in Europe, of the dan- 
ger which threatened her. She must lose 
severely, even if he sold out all her interests, 
but his advice was eager that he might be per- 
mitted to sell. He was of the average type of 
what are called ‘^men of business,” and they 
are always eager to leave a ship which shows 
any signs of damage. But Mrs. Knox had been 
unwilling to give the permission. Her father 
was one of the men, in advance of his time, 
who had been called crazy for pressing for- 
ward the works of public improvement which 
make the nation what it is. The nation had 
forgotten him. But she had not forgotten 
him. She remembered his pride in the tri- 
umphant success of this i:)articular line. And 
she almost felt as if her agent had asked her 
to change her name because it would not 
rhyme with Silver, or to buy a new carriage 
because Mr. Baal had one of a different kind 
from that she fancied. 

The agent had no money to remit to her. 
All her money, he said, was needed for taxes 


226 


SYBIL KNOX. 


and repairs on real estate, and “betterments” 
on her city property. If the C. & 0. jiaid 
nothing, he had nothing to pay her. She had 
accordingly instructed him to borrow some 
money by pledging some of the stock. Actu- 
ally, by this borrowed money had she wound 
up her affairs in Europe and come over on. 
And she knew perfectly well that her income 
for two years had been far less than nothing. 

She was not the only“lamb ” thus led to the 
slaughter. The stock had been one of those 
stocks “handy for women, you know,” in 
which trustees and guardians, and the steady 
men of that sort, are particularly glad to salt 
down the provisions left for people who, as 
is supposed, cannot take care of themselves. 
And thus, when Mr. Baal had selected this 
particular fold for his attacks, the lambs which 
were folded in it were more tender and more 
helpless than is even the average lamb. 

As September came in Mi’s. Knox’s cousin 
wrote her a more severe letter than ever. It 
was simply madness, he said, to hold on. He 
had talked with the shrewdest and the best 
men in the street, and he named them to her. 


SYBIL KNOX. 


227 


They were aghast to think that any man in his 
senses, holding what was virtually a trust fund, 
had held on so long to what was really a dis- 
honored stock. He wrote with the hardness 
and bitterness of a prophet who had given 
warning and who had been unheard. He wrote 
with the harder hardness of a man of business, 
who has said the right thing and has had a 
fool to deal with. Here was a property once 
worth more than a hundred and fifty thousand 
dollars, which now could not be sold for a 
third part of that sum, and for a mere senti- 
ment, she was resolved, he said, that it should 
be sold for nothing. A bankrupt railroad — it 
was that and nothing more. 

The letter ended by his saying stifla.y, that 
he would have nothing more to do with the 
management of her affairs if she refused the 
permission to sell. She must select some 
other agent. His account was submitted as 
always ; the k6ys of her safes would be placed 
in any hands she would suggest. 

In short, the letter was as hard and stiff a 
letter as Convers Knox knew how to write. 
And any person who remembers him will 


228 


SYBIL KNOX. 


know that that was sufficiently stiff and 
hard. 

Mrs. Knox had before her, when she received 
it, her August bills, from grocer, butcher, 
poulterer, and all the rest. She had drawn 
the checks on the local bank for the month’s 
wages of the gardeners, the coachman, and her 
other servants. She knew how low that bank 
account was drawn. She knew that the next 
letter she wrote must be to this very Convers 
Knox, to bid him sell some of her “govern- 
ments” to provide fifteen hundred dollars for 
the service of the rest of the year. And here 
was his statement that, unless she would do 
thus and so, he would throw up the charge of 
her affairs. 

And why should she not do what he wanted? 

She knew Just how far this matter of sen- 
timent went. Originally, when it was a 
question of pluck for a few months only, she 
had not hesitated ; she would ncft sacrifice the 
property for which her dear father had given 
his life. But she would never have carried this 
feeling so far as to have ruined herself pecuni- 
arily. She knew, as well as Convers Knox knew. 


SYBIL KNOX. 


229 


that that was absurd. And, just as she would 
have sold the house in which her father was 
born, if she must sell it, why, so would she sell 
these securities, if she must sell them. But, as 
she sat here this morning, she knew that she 
now had another reason for holding on to 
property which seemed so worthless. Yet it 
was a reason of which she could not speak — 
not to this business-adviser, certainly. No, she 
had no confidential friend to whom she could 
speak of it. Alas ! had she, then, no friends ? 
Was this the result of living as well as she 
knew how for near thirty years, that at the 
end of those years she had no one with whom 
she could consult on anything? And then 
came the certain answer that if John Coudert 
were here she should consult him, and should 
be governed absolutely by his wish. There 
came the certainty, and it was no new revela- 
tion, that she trusted him as she trusted no 
other man, and certainly no woman, in the 
Avorld. And here she had his statement on 
this very point. He begged her not to do 
precisely what Convers Knox bade her do. 

Still she could not say to any one, that she 


230 


SYBIL KNOX. 


was flying in the face of all her other advisers 
because he had urged her to do so. Foolishly 
or not, she felt that this was her secret, and it 
was a secret that she could not confide. None 
the less did she write to the friend of her voy- 
age, Judge Kendrick, who was in New York. 
She asked him to see her cousin, Convers 
Knox, and gave him full jiowers to take the 
management of her property. She did say to 
him, “Mr. Knox wishes me to sell out my 
Western securities, but I am strongly urged 
by Mr. Coudert to hold them. I have written 
to him with regard to it, and have no answer.” 
For that letter which she had sent to Memphis 
had, of course, brought no reply from him. 


CHAPTER XX. 



HUS far Coudert had made his inquiries 


J- as to the fortunes of the C. & O. as quietly 
as possible, but it was now decided that he 
had best consult wdth the officers of the road, 
and see if their half of evidence and conjec- 
ture would make a whole when joined to his 
half. It was not a long journey to Coramville, 
the company’s headquarters, and Coudert, 
after a little inquiry, easily found his way to 
the narrow stairway leading up to the superin- 
tendent’s office. There were several men com- 
ing in from the street as he came from the 
station. Following Rollo’s rule, he also fol- 
lowed the crowd, and they went together up 
the corridor, till the man ahead opened the 
door marked “Superintendent,” and they all 
went in together. 

Coudert was a little surprised to find himself 
ushered within the rail and into the private 
office, as if he were one of this party. The 


232 


SYBIL KNOX. 


room was not large and he could not well 
separate himself from them. They were all 
serious-looking men of middle age, and all 
dressed in black frock coats, which had a look 
as of Sunday best, except that the leader, a 
stout man, with a heavy black mustache, 
wore a flashy suit of checked dittoes and a still 
more flashy diamond. 

The superintendent, Mr. Martinet, was not 
seated. He came forward, passed the flashy 
leader, and shook hands with several of the 
sober men. Before he was done, the leader, 
now behind him, spoke in a voice much too 
large for the room : 

“We come here as representatives of the 
Confederation of Toil to demand the adjust- 
ment of our grievances.” 

The superintendent faced round. 

“I do not know you, sir; but I should be 
sorry to think that any of my friends on the road 
need come to me in any other quality than that 
of the employes of the C. & O. These gentle- 
men are working for us ; I suppose they have 
come in that capacity. Are you an employ^ 
of the road, sir?” 


SYBIL KNOX. 


233 


The flashy man laid his hand on the back of 
a chair. 

“I am Mr. J. Walker,” he replied, “past 
grand chancellor and chairman of the Execu- 
tive Committee of the Grand Lodge of the 
Confederation of Toil. These,” and he waved 
his hand, “are the Grievance Committee of 
District Assembly No. 347, C. of T. I am not 
in your employ, sir.” 

“Are you working for any one, Mr. 
Walker?” said Martinet. “ I remember you 
now, but you have shaved off your beard since 
we dismissed you. Are you still inspecting 
cars ? You were a good hand at that when 
you took care of yourself.” 

Coudert started ; this was Walker, the faith- 
less inspector, whose neglect had caused those 
wrecks on the C. & O. 

Walker’s clutch on the chair-back tightened. 

“I am round-house foreman on the Great 
Midland,” said he, with an attempt at bravado. 
The Great Midland was the northern connec- 
tion of the C. & O., and the more voracious 
of the two roads controlled by that common 
enemy, Baal. . 


234 


SYBIL KNOX. 


“I am glad to hear that you are doing well, 
Walker,” said the superintendent ; ” you have 
plenty of ability if you only try to exert it. 
But, at present, I can hardly talk to you." 
Some of my friends here on the road want me 
to arrange something for them, and it seems 
to me that you are out of place.” Then he 
faced round, “Boys, what can I do for you?” 
said he to the others. 

Walker turned white with rage ; he sprang 
forward and clutched the superintendent’s 
shoulders. “I represent the Grand Lodge of 
the Confederation. Do you refuse to recognize 
the Confederation ? ” 

Martinet flung his arm off. “I refuse to 
recognize you!''' 

“ I told you'so ! ” shouted Walker ; “I told 
you he would refuse to recognize the Confedera- 
tion. We can do nothing with him, and the 
sooner we go the better. Come out of this, 
we can do nothing with a man who refuses to 
recognize the Confederation. Come ! ” 

He passed out of the door. One of the men 
followed him, then another. One of the two 
left looked at him and then at Martinet. “ If 


SYBIL KNOX. 


235 


we don’t go he will have us expelled and boy- 
cotted,” he whispered ; and they passed out. 

Coudert was thus left with the superintend- 
ent, who had already crossed the room to his 
desk and rung a bell. 

“Excuse me, Mr. Martinet, for what seems 
an intrusion, but I am concerned in this, too. 
My name is Coudert. Mr. Bliven represents 
my interest on the board.” 

Martinet’s look of distrust changed, and, 
after giving a hurried order to the porter who 
had answered the bell, he took Coudert’ s 
hand. 

“I am very glad to meet you, Mr. Coudert, 
but I fear you must excuse me now. As you 
know, the president is sick and the manager 
abroad, so that I am alone, and I fear I have a 
little too much on my hands.” 

At this moment a young man came in whom 
Mr. Martinet introduced as his chief operator. 

“John,” said he, “have you spotted all 
your C. of T. men yet ? I want that informa- 
tion sooner than I had expected.” 

“ Only in the city,” was the reply. “ I am 
not sure about all the others.” 


236 


SYBIL KNOX. 


“That may do,” said Martinet. “Let me 
see. It is now three-thirty. How many of 
them have you ? ” 

“ Four that I am sure of, two that I suspect. 
The other four operators here are all right.” 

“Yery well; send three of them north on 
the four o’clock, and three south on the four- 
ten. Don’t dismiss them, you understand ; 
just send them to isolated offices where they 
can’t do any harm. I will give you Miller and 
Smith here ; they are operators, you know, 
and you must pick up some work. And if 
any stranger — any one, you know — comes to- 
day with a message tell him all right, and send 
the message here. Do you understand ? ” 

The chief operator had been taking notes as 
Martinet spoke. 

“There is one man I may not be able to 
catch in time, but they can’t either,” and he 
turned and went out almost on the run. 

Martinet had rung again by this time. 

“ That is only a temporary relief,” said he ; 
“it will postpone the strike out of town, I 
hope, but Walker will get word to them’ to- 
morrow.” 


SYBIL KNOX. 


237 


“ Can’t you arrest him ? ” said Coudert. 

“I wish I could,” replied Martinet; “but 
how? ” 

“Criminal conspiracy,” was the reply. 
“Wasn’t he mixed up in those bad wrecks 
some time ago ? ” 

“ Yes ; but we couldn’t prove anything.” 

“ Perhaps we can now ; and at any rate it 
would be a delay.” 

At this moment the master mechanic came 
in. 

“ Mr. Frame,” said Martinet, “ none of your 
engineers are Confederate men, are they ? ” 

“No, sir; they are Chevaliers, all of them, 
but most of the firemen are Confederates.” 

“ I am afraid. Frame, that the Confederates 
will go out to-night, so you must skirmish 
round and get men to fire, and. Frame, tell 
your men to keep quiet about the strike out 
on the road. I hope we can confine it to the 
town here.” 

As Frame turned to go Coudert said ; 

“ Mr. Frame, do you remember Inspector 
Walker?” 

“Yes, sir; he ought to be in jail now. He 


238 


SYBIL KNOX. 


killed more men by his neglect than most 
hangmen have by their trade. Neglect, did I 
call it ? It was the sort of neglect that would 
sober most men, but, if you’ll believe it, he 
was sober when he inspected that train and 
drunk afterward.” 

“Can you' prove that in a court of law?” 
asked Martinet eagerly : “or could you swear 
to it before a magistrate ? ” 

“No, but two of my men can,” was the 
reply. 

So Mr. Frame was hurried off for his wit- 
nesses and to get a warrant sworn out against 
Walker, and Coudert left the office with a real 
hope in his heart. 

As Coudert walked toward his hotel he 
passed the office of the Parachute, the evening 
paper of Coramville. There was quite a little 
crowd of newsboys gathered for the next edi- 
tion, and as Coudert looked across the street 
at them he saw Walker, the Confederate 
“leader,” coming out of the office. He 
nodded to Coudert and crossed the street to him. 

“I don’t remember your name,” said he; 
“ have you been with the road long ? ” 


SYBIL KNOX. 


239 


Coudert told him his name, and said he had 
been interested in the road. since he was a boy. 
He added that he had never been mixed up in 
any labor troubles before, which was probably 
the reason he had never met Walker. 

“ Well,” was the reply, “ I am sorry, very 
sorry, I have ever had anything to do with 
labor troubles. People think we leaders make 
a good thing out of it, but it’s harder work 
than I care for. Look at to-day ; why, I have 
been running round since midnight last night 
and I am hardly done yet.” 

“Have you sent the order out?” asked 
Coudert, at a venture. 

“ Come in and have a drink,” said Walker, 
“ and I’ll tell you.” 

Under ordinary circumstances Coudert would 
have thought twice before accepting such an 
invitation, but now he eagerly followed the 
man into the gaudy bar-room, and sat down 
with him at a small table in one corner. As 
they passed in he heard a policeman say to the 
man next him : 

“ There goes Walker, the labor man.” 

After they were seated Walker began again ; 


240 


SYBIL KNOX. 


Coudert fancied he had already been drinking, 
and deeply. “I was sitting up in a car all last 
night, couldn’t get a sleeping-car pass — blessed 
if I won’t raise a strike among the porters — 
then this morning I had to run round to get a 
meeting of your Grievance Committee ; hardly 
knew the men, and they had forgotten most of 
their grievances. I had to brace you all up 
and get you to go to the boss’s, and then he 
would have soft-soaped you all if I hadu’t 
helped you out again. Since then I have been 
writing telegrams to all your Assemblies, and 
getting them rushed, and ” 

“ How did you send the messages ? ” 

“ Company wire, of course. We have all 
the operators. I was up in the office by four- 
fifteen. Sent them off in cipher — seven o’clock 
to-night, mind. Then I have had to create 
public sentiment. Was up at the Parachute 
about that, which you fellows have neglected, 
and all to oblige a friend.” 

“ What friend ?” asked Coudert, looking at 
the light through his glass with a show of in- 
difference. 

“What friend? The biggest man in this 


STBIL KNOX. 


241 


State, I can tell yon. He has got me into more 
trouble than whiskey has,” and he held up his 
glass, “ but he always gets me out again. He 
always stands by his friends. He got me my 
job on the Great Midland after he had lost me 
my job on the ” 

He stopped and peered at Coudert suspi- 
ciously, as if fearing he had gone too far. 

At this moment a boy burst in from the 
street. 

“Say, Mr. Walker,” he whispered, 'in a 
hoarse voice, “ them messages- didn’t get sent. 
The boss has them all ! And all our fellows 
were sent off to different places out of town 
before you was in, and nobody knows, and I 
don’t darest to strike all alone.” And the 
little fellow was gone again. 

Walker started up, completely sobered. 

“Where’s the Western Union Otiice?” he 
cried, as he threw a silver piece on the bar and 
strode out. ‘ ‘ Come this way, Coudert ; we 
can reach them by Western Union. I have 
money enough, I think.” 

He threw open the door only to meet a police 
officer. 


242 


SYBIL KNOX. 


“I arrest you, Walker. I have a warrant 
here, so you had better come quietly. It’s for 
your old trouble, that wreck, you know — crim- 
inal conspiracy.” 

How his friends in the city of Franklin 
might like this sudden stroke, to which the 
rather slow Mr. Martinet had been roused by 
the exigencies of the strike, John Coudert did 
not know. But he telegraphed at length to 
Scarlet, the attorney-general, and more briefly 
to “ jolly Ned Needham,” what had been done, 
and he spent half the night in writing a long 
letter to Scarlett to tell him what the position 
was. In the morning he was able to see the dif- 
ferent witnesses whom it would be necessary to 
call; and, with the experience of many years, 
he sifted sadly out the grains of fact which 
could be stuck to through all cross-examina- 
tion, from the wishes, fears, guesses, and fan- 
cies of these men. He then determined to try 
another interview with Berlitz, on whose testi- 
mony, after all, so much would depend if it 
proved advisable to ride two horses, and to re- 
new the investigation possibly with another 


SYBIL KNOX. 


243 


criminal trial for that matter of the burning of 
the woodsheds. He crossed, therefore, to Dor- 
casville by a meandering route, which took in 
half a dozen broken-winded railroads, which 
were going through processes not unlike the 
decline of the Cattaraugus & Opelousas. In 
the time which it took him to cross the country 
thus, he could have crossed to the Mississippi 
Valley in one of the flying trains. But he had 
an object-lesson of what it is to have a road 
run by a ‘‘receiver” on its receipts, and^a road 
in which the great mercantile public takes no 
concern. 

Arrived at the prison, Coudert saw his ami- 
able friend who fancied himself curing these 
people of the disease called crime, and sub- 
jected himself, first of all, to a long, dreamy 
interview with him. He was at the moment 
reading, in a French translation, one of Bec- 
caria’s treatises on crime, but, after a little, he 
managed to recollect who Coudert was, and 
after a little more he managed to go back to his 
diary of the first observations he had made on 
the patient Berlitz, who was sent to him for two 
years as alfflict^d with the disease incendiarism. 


244 


SYBIL KNOX. 


Coudert did his best to quicken him on 
his remembering side, and finally asked him 
whether Berlitz had in his possession no letters 
or papers, when his clothing was taken from 
him and he was made to put on the prison wear. 
The physician of crime expressed surprise at 
such a question, for he said these papers were 
all carefully locked up for the use of the patient 
when he should recover. For his part, he 
should consider it a violation of trust to ex- 
amine any of them. But he remembered very 
well that there were many letters, and they 
were all under the county seal in the county 
safe ; this with a certain threatening air to 
Coudert, as if to imply that Coudert himself 
had the disease of dynamitism, and meant to 
explode this safe in order to obtain these 
papers. This was all that at this time John 
Coudert got from this ideologist. But the 
ideologist consented that he should converse 
with Berlitz, and Berlitz was ordered out from 
the harness-room, where he was at work, into 
a room sacred to such interviews. 

He was a different man from the oppressed, 
downcast creature whom Coudert had seen 

4 » 


SYBIL KNOX. 


246 


before. If the physician of crime had brought 
this about he was entitled to great credit. But 
it soon proved that it had been brought about 
much more by a letter from his wife. This 
letter was the letter, which perhaps the reader 
recollects, which contained a one-dollar bill, 
and it had been working its way through the 
processes of the dead-letter office. The admir- 
able women who conduct the search-depart- 
ment there had “gone for” Berlitz — if one 
may use a nipe bit of slang— as a “darning- 
needle” goes for a mosquito. They had first 
sent to Texas, to the Salm Colony, where there 
are Berlitzes by the hundred. But the Texan 
postmaster, after trying any number of Ger- 
hards, had sent the letter, with its dollar-bill, 
back to them. He had given them an endorse- 
ment, however, to try something else, and 
something else had been tried. A Catholic 
bishop had been drawn into the inquiry, but, 
after furnishing three or four Gerhards, he had 
given it up in despair. It was then that some- 
body engaged in the search, reading some old 
number of a county newspaper, had seen that 
Gerhard Berlitz had been arrested on this 


246 


SYBIL KNOX. 


charge, and the letter had been sent to Dorcas- 
Yille, and there triumphantly had remained. 
So far as known, nobody had thanked these 
excellent people in the dead-letter office for 
this perseverance, beyond the perseverance of 
the saints. But, all the same, Berlitz had the 
letter of his wife, he had the dollar-bill, and 
all this within six or eight weeks of the time 
when the letter was written. It seemed to give 
him a confidence which nothing that Coudert 
had said of his wife had given him. He had 
been glad to see the picture, but now he had 
seen her own handwriting. And, with the joy 
of a young lover who had received his first 
letter from his sweetheart, he handed to John 
Coudert the letter itself. 

It was in badly-written German handschrift. 
But it was not the first time that John Coudert 
had read bad German. He wanted all Berlitz’s 
confidence, and he therefore read the letter 
aloud to him from end to end. As he came to 
the end he fairly started as he read the words, 
“Whenever you receive this you must write 
to me at once. Address me to the care of Mrs. 
Sybil Knox, Atherton, Vermont.” 


SYBIL KNOX. 


247 


Clear was it then that on the critical day, 
when this letter was written, Mrs. Knox still 
retained her name. And, by putting this and 
that together, Coudert made himself sure that 
the statement of her marriage, made to him at 
Memphis, was at least what the reporters call 
“premature.” 


CHAPTER XXI. 



W O meetings of the Atherton Chapter of 


-L the Order of “Send Me” had been held 
before Mrs. Knox met with her sister com- 
panions of that Order. She had cordially 
accepted their invitation. But she was not 
yet used to their promptness of obedience, 
which was, indeed, easier to such young people 
as most of them were. The third meeting, 
however, found her present, cordially deter- 
mined to do her best, but curious, after all the 
explanations of her friends, to know what was 
expected of her. 

Her initiation was very simple, as she had 
expected. It was the custom of the Chapter 
to receive one new member with every second 
month. And at this meeting she found that a 
delicate young woman, whom she had never 
seen in their village sociabilities, was to be 
initiated with her. 

The moment when the little mantel-clock 


248 / 


SYBIL KNOX. 


249 


struck three Mrs. Carrigan clapped her hands 
and said “Order! ” and the chattering assem- 
bly was hushed. “Hatty, dear, will you 
play?” said the lady president. And Hatty, 
who was next the piano, played Sullivan’s 
spirited music, and the Society, all standing, 
sang one verse of “Onward, Christian sol- 
diers.” Then they sat, and all those who 
were used to the meeting bent their heads for 
prayer. Without any apparent lead, they all 
united in these words : 

“Father of perfect love, we trust that love 
entirely. Help us to help each other, and to 
do something for Thy Kingdom. Father, we 
ask it in His Name.” 

Mrs. Carrigan had been till now sitting with 
her knitting by her at the open window. The 
meeting was now begun, however, and she 
crossed to her davenport, where Mrs. Knox 
had already seen an open record-book and a 
tile of letters. 

“ I will read Clara’s journal,” she said. And 
she read a report, severely condensed, of the 
last meeting. There were notes of two or three 
charities among the poorer people of the town. 


2o0 


SYBIL KNOX. 


of the success and difficulties of a reading- 
room which had been established in the factory 
village at Lyman’s Mills, an abstract of two 
letters received, one from Boston and one from 
Tientsin, and the names of the committees 
appointed to answer them. A note on Mrs. 
Edwards’s difficulty, or her son’s, showed that 
he was not only out of jail, but that the prose- 
cution had been withdrawn. 

“ Is the record approved ? It is approved,” 
said Mrs. Carrigan. She then turned to Mrs. 
Knox. “ I believe you know every one, unless 
it is Miss Robideau, who is a newcomer like 
yourself. Miss Robideau, you must feel at 
home with us all, and learn the names as you 
work with us and talk with us. Ladies, listen 
while I read the charter and the constitution 
to the new members.” And then she read the 
charter. 

The constitution is this : 

“We join the Atherton Circle of Send Me. 
We will go where the Master sends. Our hope 
is to do some good — to bring in his Kingdom, 
and to grow into better life. We will try to 
look up and not down, to look forward and 


SYBIL KNOX. 


251 


not back, to look out and not in, and to lend a 
band.” 

The newcomers knew what was expected of 
them, and they signed the constitution. Mrs. 
Carrigan pinned a Maltese cross with a ribbon 
on the dress of each, and the ceremony of ad- 
mission was thus simply finished. 

“The Asney Circle open their public library 
next Friday afternoon. Who can go to repre- 
sent us ? ” 

Three ladies volunteered. 

“ Huldah, dear, about Lyman’s Mills.” The 
shy, slight, pretty young girl who viras thus 
called on had a little note-book in her hand, 
to which she referred occasionally for dates or 
figures. She blushed, and spoke a little nerv- 
ously at first, but, in a minute, she had warmed 
up to her subject, and gave a very intelligent, 
often amusing, account of the ups and downs 
of this public reading-room and library, of 
which, like our readers, Mrs. Knox had first 
heard when the report was read. The reading- 
room had been moved downstairs into the en- 
tertainment room. It seemed that there was a 
social feeling, even among boys and girls who 


252 


SYBIL KNOX. 


were reading Harper' s Monthly, or looking at 
the Illustrated News. They wanted to be 
among their race. So the neat little reading- 
room upstairs had been abandoned, and large 
tables, with the picture-newspapers and maga- 
zines, were arranged upon it below stairs. The 
people who read, read among others who 
played chess and checkers, and dominoes and 
parlor-croquet, and other games which Sybil 
Knox had never heard of. 

The committee wanted an appropriation for 
I! Illustration and Le Monde Illustre, pub- 
lished in Montreal. And the report closed 
with the eager wish that they could interest 
the Canadian village at Lyman’s Mills, as they 
had not yet done. Huldah Wadsworth laid 
down her notes and made the others scream 
with laughter as she described her failure in 
talking French with these people. “Actually, 
you know, they do not understand their own 
language.” But she was firm in the faith that 
somebody could interest them, and keep those 
nice French boys from sitting in the post-ofHce 
on barrels every evening throwing bottle-corks 


% 




SYBIL KNOX. 


258 


at each, other. ‘'Only I am not that some- 
body.” 

In a most unparliamentary way, the Club 
fell into a talk on this whole Lyman’s Mills 
business. Different girls told of their own suc- 
cesses and failures. It seemed that on Monday 
one or two went down and spent the evening 
at the library, with brothers or fathers or other 
men-folk, so as to be there to answer ques- 
tions, to teach people how to play chess, or, in 
general, to grease the wheels of the machine. 
There was no end of stories, often very funny, 
as to their experiences in these hospitalities. 
What was clear enough was that they were 
determined the enterprise should go through ; 
and that they had found out that it would not 
go through, unless they all gave their personal 
help in the guiding and working of the ma- 
chinery. 

After a good deal of this detail, which some- 
times had something to do with future plans, 
and more often had not, the pale Miss Robi- 
deau, who was one of the two new members, 
crossed to Mrs. Carrigan and said, without 


254 


SYBIL KNOX. 


addressing the whole company, that she was 
interested in what was said about the French 
boys. “ I could not do much with them, I 
suppose. But I could with their sisters, I 
think. You know I am their countrywoman, 
and — and ” 

She stopped with a little delicacy, doubting 
how she might best say that her French was 
perhaps better than Huldah’s. Mrs. Carri- 
gan did not hesitate to supply the words. 

“And, of course,” she said, “they will be 
glad to talk in your language, if they can- 
not speak in Huldah’s. Huldah, dear, come 
and hear what Miss Eobideau is thinking 
of.” 

“Let me hear, also,” said Sybil Knox, a 
little annoyed with herself that she had not 
had the courage to say the same thing. From 
the moment when she had heard that easy 
French was in demand in this Green Mountain 
town where fate had thrown her, she had felt 
that she was not wholly an exile in her own 
home. “ Miss Eobideau, try to make room 
for me when you go over. As for L' Illustra- 
tion, I have fifty back numbers in the house. 


SYBIL KNOX. 


255 


and I do not believe they will care much for 
novelty.” 

Miss Robideau was one of the dressmakers 
in the village. She had lived there only a 
year or two. But Mrs. Carrigan, who always 
had her eyes open to what was available in 
Atherton, had marked her for her own since 
she had first employed her, pleased with the 
girl’s simplicity, modesty, precision, and deli- 
cacy of taste, as well as bearing. Mrs. Carri- 
gan had never meant that the “Send Me” 
should drift into the restrictions or exclusive- 
ness of parish circles in Atherton. She wa§ 
more than glad when she found that Miss 
Robideau went regularly to the Catholic 
church at Asney, though it cost her a long 
ride, and she knew that there could not be too 
much money in that purse. She had urged 
the girls to follow up their acquaintance with 
the stranger, and had succeeded, with some 
difficulty, in persuading her to join them. 
She was more than pleased, therefore, with her 
willingness and good sense, which showed that 
she had so well taken in the motive and plans 
of the Order. 


256 


SYBIL KNOX. 


“I can gladly go Tuesday nights regularly, 
unless the weather is too severe.” It is Miss 
Robideau who speaks. ‘ ‘ And Friday, also, if 
anybody wants me. I can go out on the mail 
train. You know it passes here at six seven, 
and I would close the shop those nights a 
little early. Then I would come back on the 
morning milk train ; that comes in at half-past 
seven, quite in time for my breakfast. But I 
should have to find some nice person there 
who would sleep me,'"’ she said, laughing. 
“Do you know, Mrs. Knox, if I can manage 
that part? I believe it will work beauti- 
fully.” 

Sybil Knox listened with a real admiration. 
That is to say, pleasure and surprise mingled 
as she heard this poor girl, who had to work 
for her daily bread, so unaffectedly give away 
two of her precious evenings every week, 
simply to be of some use to other people ; and 
as she listened she felt, with satisfaction 
hardly to be told, that her turn had now come. 

“Better than that. Mademoiselle. I speak 
French a little myself. Though these Cana- 
dian boys may not wholly like my accent, I 


SYBIL KNOX. 


257 


know I can make them understand. I am not 
much at chess, but I can play jackstraws and 
dominoes. Now my plan is this : We are not 
wanted there till seven. It is only three miles 
across. You shall shut the shop early, as you 
say. I will send down regularly for you and 
you shall come up to me — it is half a mile on 
the way, you know — and we will have a 
hurried cup of tea. Then we will drive over 
to Lyman’s, put the hack in some shed they 
will have, play jackstraws and tweedle-John, 
and come back together. I shall drive my- 
self — if you are not afraid of my driving. If 
you will take the bed at our house you shall 
have breakfast when you will.” 

The shy Frenchwoman hardly knew how to 
take this eager, but very acceptable, invita- 
tion. She was really too modest to be willing 
to throw herself so freely on another, whom 
she only had met that afternoon. And she 
had that wretched consciousness that, as 
things were, she in no way could offer any 
courtesy to Mrs. Knox on the same scale. 
Still, she was well bred, so she knew how to 
express her thanks, and, not unnaturally, she 


258 


SYBIL KNOX. 


fell into her own language. She thanked Mrs. 
Knox, while she expressed the fear that she 
made trouble. Here Mrs. Carrigan interfered. 

“ Trouble, ma cTiere, of course it makes 
f;rouble. Do we not all make trouble ? Do 
not the boys over at Lyman’s make the very 
trouble we want to mend % Does not Gross- 
bein, who sells the lager to them, make more 
trouble ? Just what we are Sent for is to undo 
trouble, and what we are pledged for is to take 
trouble on our shoulders which other people 
would have to bear.” 

She was so voluble in her eloquence that they 
all laughed, and Mrs. Knox, who had a certain 
shyness of her own, was better able to press 
her offer. She wanted to lend a hand, and this 
seemed the simple way. 

“ Simple or not simjile, it is the way we will 
doit,” said Mrs. Carrigan. ‘‘I am president 
of this branch, so that I may have things done, 
and I decide that this is the best way to do 
this. Let no one rebel. 

“More seriously,” she added, as they seated 
themselves at a little table with some beef-tea 
before them and some bread and butter — 


SYBIL KNOX. 


259 


‘‘more seriously, I suppose that in the twen- 
tieth century we shall put our opportunities to- 
gether in rather different relations from those 
they hold conventionally to-day. That is, just 
as a soldier is in ‘ the service,’ you know, and 
there is no lack of modesty when he says he 
may be called at an instant, and must obey on 
the instant — I suppose it will then be all 
natural and simple for every one to stand in 
the attitude of ‘Send Me.’ And we shall go 
off two and two, shall we not, where there is 
anything to be done, as Philip went off with 
Bartholomew, and John with James, as if it 
were a thing oJ course to go where we were told 
to go ? 

“ But mark this,” said the dictatorial lady, 
“nobody goes two nights in the week from the 
Send Me to Lyman’s Mills, or anywhere else. 
We abolished slavery in 1863. Now slavery 
consists in being bound by certain appoint- 
ments to do things not contemplated when you 
entered into bondage. We have force enough 
to send some one else Friday. Clara, book 
Mrs. Knox and Miss Robideau for Tuesdays at 
Lyman’s.” 


260 


SYBIL KNOX. 


The arrival of the beef-tea and bread and 
butter broke the party up into four or five dif- 
ferent knots. There were, in fact, so many 
working-parties who had different enterprises 
on hand. Beside the reading-room at Lyman’s 
there was a loan collection of prints ; there was 
an arrangement for reading to the men who 
could not read at the Soldier’s Retreat ; there 
was a commission on the town park, which was 
trying to make an Arboretum of Vermont 
there ; and there was a committee on the town 
poorhouse. At this time the Send Me had all 
these enterprises in hand. 

When Mrs. Knox returned to her home from 
the meeting of Send Me, late in the evening, 
the afternoon’s mail awaited her. 

She looked at it with some indifference, sure 
only that it would contain, what she now ex- 
pected once a week — directions from all her 
men of business, cousins, and cousins’ wives, 
to sell out her C. & O. stock. Still, one must 
look at the outsides of one’s letters. So she 
turned over the bunch, rather larger than 
usual, and her indifference vanished when she 
saw the well-known hand of John Coudert. 


SYBIL KNOX. 


261 


His letter was long for a persOT who had had 
so little correspondence with her, and deals 
with matters so far remote from Atherton 
that they must make the subject of another 
chapter. 


CHAPTER XXII. 

John Coudert to Sybil Knox. 

Dorcasville, McDowell Co., 

October 7. 

My Dear Mrs. Knox : 

(If that is still your name.) I do not know 
how you think this world is governed. But 
one of those surprises, which make one think 
that somebody directs it who knows what he is 
about, has just now put me in possession of in- 
formation to which you are entitled. 

It is only Avithin an hour that I have learned 
that I may probably still address you — as I am 
most glad to do — as Mrs. Knox ; or that I was 
right in so addressing you on the 7th of August, 
when I had the pleasure of writing you from 
St. Louis. 

Oddly enough, this pleasant news came to 
me in a prison, and through the intervention 
of our poor friend, Berlitz, regarding whom at 
that time I wrote to you. I suppose you were 
not able to give me any information about him. 
But a letter his wife wrote him, from your 
house, has arrived, and I hope his answer to 
262 


SYBIL KNOX. 


263 


hers will reach her by the mail which brings 
you this. 

Reading so far, Mrs. Knox rang the bell, 
and was told at once that Mrs. Berlitz had a 
letter from her husband and had been crying 
till she went to bed. The other “girls” had 
given her what they called a sleeping-mixture 
of hops, and she was now asleep. They had 
thought it'best not to bother their mistress 
about this until morning. 

John QouderV s letter continued : 

Mrs. Berlitz’ s letter gives your address with 
your name unchanged. As I have no later 
tidings from you, you will understand my 
using the same address. 

I write on the same subject on which I ad- 
dressed you from St. Louis. I can well under- 
stand that all your advisers are begging you to 
sacrifice our poor C. & O. kid to the mercies of 
any priest who will cut its throat for you. I 
write to beg you not to do so. And, strangely 
enough, it is your kindness to Frau Berlitz 
which puts me almost in a position of certainty 
in this affair. 

Strange to say, if anything were strange in 
this world, Berlitz proves to be a most impor- 


264 


SYBIL KNOX. 


tant witness in the chain of testimony by which 
we hope to bring Baal, the King of Iniquity, as 
I suppose you know, to trial. Berlitz is in 
prison himself for no fault whatever. Make 
that sure to his wife. He detected an incendiary, 
he was without counsel, almost without an in- 
terpreter, and, “for the greater caution,” as 
the lawyers say, he was shut up himself in 
prison for two years, because nobody knew 
what else to do with him. The incident of the 
letter has given me an opportunity to see all the 
papers which were on his person when he was 
imprisoned. Strange to say, one of these 
papers supplies what I have said is the miss- 
ing link in an astounding line of testimony, 
which we hope will break up the great con- 
spiracy against our road. I hardly know why 
I call it a conspiracy which is conceived in the 
brain of one man, and carried out with pitiless 
resolution. 

I beg you, my dear Mrs. Knox, not to think 
that I wish to force a correspondence upon you, 
when I know that you already have more friends 
than any other person in the world. I should 
not have taken the liberty to write a second 
time, but that I can now, as you see, give 
almost absolute confirmation to the advice 
which I gave in my letter from St. Louis. But 
I should like the favor of a reply, letting me 


SYBIL KNOX. 


265 


know that yon have received this letter. Unless 
you wish it, then, I will not trouble you with 
farther advice in a matter which, I can well 
conceive, may be very annoying to you. 

Truly yours, 

John Coudert. 

It is hard to say whether this letter gave to 
Mrs. Knox more pleasure or more pain. Ex- 
quisite pain, one might almost call the surprise 
that she felt that he had evidently never re- 
ceived the cordial letter which she had written 
to him on receipt of his letter from St. Louis. 
Exquisite pleasure, it must be confessed, at one 
or two of the expressions, where he said he 
was glad to call her still Sybil Knox, and spoke 
of the announcement of that simple fact as 
“pleasant news.” 

She did not permit herself to go to bed this 
time before she wrote her hasty answer, and 
placed upon it a stamp for immediate delivery. 
It was simply to say that she was glad of the 
good news, that she had not ventured to wake 
Mrs. Berlitz from her sleep, that she had 
trusted fully to his advice in the matter of the 
investments, and that she should continue to 


266 


SYBIL KNOX. 


do SO. It also expressed, with sufficient eager- 
ness, her regret that he had never received the 
letter which she had written him at once in 
answer to his. It ended in these words, which 
tried to be huinorous : 

I am still Mrs. Knox, and am likely to be. I 
cannot conceive how you heard anything else, 
excepting that there are many Mrs. Knoxes 
in the world, and probably there is now some- 
body who is rejoicing in another name. But I 
have no friends in Memphis, and am ashamed 
to say that I hardly knew where Memphis 
was. 

I am doing my best to keep the promise 
which I think I made to you, that I would see 
to the full what a country town in Vermont 
has for life, befoi’e I pretended to think that 
Paris or Rome or Washington could give me a 
better home. Thus far I am happy here, and 
have not found many of the drawbacks which 
kind friends forewarned me of. 

I cannot thank you enough for your loyal 
interest to the holders in this almost ship- 
wrecked property. If no one else knows how 
much we owe to you, be sure that I do, and 
that I am always. 

Truly yours, 


Sybil Knox. 


SYBIL KNOX. 


267 


This letter came to John Coudert while he 
was still starving at Dorcasville. It did him 
what the people of that country call no end 
of good.” Physically he needed some sup- 
port, for he was literally starving on the pro- 
vision of salt pork, dropped eggs, baker’s 
crackers, and doughnuts, which was made for 
him with unchanging regularity three times a 
day in the broken-down inn. He was no 
epicure, but, to a man who had been used to 
civilized society, the utter absence of coffee,* 
for which a curious mixture made of burned 
sweet potatoes was substituted, the absence at 
the same time of all fresh meat, the absence of 
what they call soft bread” in the army, and 
the monotony of the other fare, involved, not 
questions of epicureanism, but serious ques- 
tions of health. On the other hand, he was in 
the midst of such peaches as he had not known 
were in the world ; and if a man could live, 
as Adam and Eve did, on the fruits of the 
orchard, he would have been perfectly happy. 

But he had worse distresses than those of 
food on his mind. However, he was in for the 
campaign, and he knew that, if he were in for 


268 


SYBIL KNOX. 


the camjiaign, he must live as a soldier lives. 
So he accepted the baker’s crackers and the 
fried pork. But he had found it harder to 
bury the remembrance, which rose from its 
grave every day, that Sybil Knox was Sybil 
Somebody else ; and the other remembrance, 
which belonged to it, that she had never 
answered the letter which he wrote to her. 
Now that it appeared that she had answered 
the letter, and that she was Sybil Knox, life 
'appeared to John Coudert from a very differ- 
ent point of view. 

They were drawing tighter and tighter the 
strings, and yet they gave, and could give, lio 
sign abroad. As Coudert read his New York 
paper from day to day, he saw that the prices 
of the C. & O. stocks and bonds went down 
steadily. It was clear that the great enemy 
himself did not know that any danger 
impended over him. It was equally clear that 
sensitive Wall Street had not found out yet 
that any attack was proposed upon him. 
There was not a syllable of discussion in the 
journals, of things which John Coudert had 
supposed would become mattey of public 


SYBIL KNOX. 


269 


notoriety at once. All this was well for him 
and. his friends, the governor and the attorney- 
general. 

That first plan in which the governor, enthu- 
siastic as he was, had engaged, had been for 
the time abandoned. He had proposed to 
bring all three of the contesting railway com- 
panies into court, and ask them the question 
why they were not dealing fairly by the 
people of the State, who had given them their 
charters. He had supposed that, even in face 
of the intelligence and wit of the learned 
counsel they would employ, some public 
answer would have to be given to this ques- 
tion, and that this public question might at 
least be a basis for some legislation within 
his State. The State was, fortunately, large 
enough to contain the whole line of the C. & 
0. He hoped for some results which would 
compel justice, not simply to the C. & O., 
which was now being crushed, for which he 
cared comparatively less, but justice also for 
the people of the State, who were not receiving 
the advantages for which they had given these 
valuable charters to the corporations which 


270 


SYBIL KNOX. 


used them. Lawyers must decide how far he 
would have succeeded in any such bold en- 
deavor. As it happened, that experiment was 
never tried before the admirable Suj)reme 
Court of the State, sitting in equity, and this 
little story cannot give an answer. 

His attorney-general, Scarlett, saying that 
he would not rush in where angels had thus 
far failed to tread, was satisfied that, for a 
beginning, they could get the matter before 
the public, which was what he thought most 
important, by bringing into court the incen- 
diary again — not on the offence for which he 
had already served out a part of his punish- 
ment, but on a new indictment. Any reader 
will see that this was at best difficult, and Mr. 
Scarlett himself knew the difficulty quite as 
well as we know it. But the fortunate dis- 
covery which John Coudert had made at Dor- 
casville — that there was undoubtedly a real 
collusion between Walker and the incendi- 
ary — gave him exactly the point which he 
needed. Coudert had understood enough of 
criminal law to make intelligent suggestions to 
the attorney -general, and on those suggestions 


SYBIL KNOX. 


271 


he and his district-attorney instantly acted. 
Neither Condert nor Scarlett, in their impetu- 
osity, considered it desirable to show their 
whole hand at the beginning. But they were 
now well convinced that the station had been 
burned down at the real orders of Baal, the 
great and ingenious speculator behind the 
scenes, who had obtained the control of the 
two lines which the C. & O. united. This 
man, in his determination to obtain command 
of the C. & O., for years past had been doing 
everything to reduce the value of its property 
in the market. To his manipulations was due 
that steady decline of the prices of its bonds, 
and other securities, which struck such terror 
into the hearts of such men as Convers Knox. 
It was perfectly clear, as a matter of fact, that 
the i)oor incendiary had been the tool of this 
arch-rascal’s ingenuity. Now they knew who 
was the agent by whom he had acted ; and by 
prosecuting Walker, that agent, they knew 
they could put the poor fellow himself upon 
the stand, and that they could compel the 
attendance of Baal himself. 

Their procedure was undoubtedly a bold 


272 


SYBIL KNOX. 


one. They knew very well that it was so. 
But no less audacious an enterprise had any 
chances of success. And they had the great 
advantage that, by proceeding thus, they 
gave, as yet, but little public notice of what 
they were engaged in, and had all the possi- 
bilities of a fortunate surprise. They knew 
very well that prosecutions for conspiracy 
were, as they ought to be, difficult, and, if one 
may use such a phrase, unpopular. But they 
were almost indifferent as to how Walker 
might come out from his danger. Whether a 
grand jury ever did or did not find an indict- 
ment against him, they cared but little. They 
were not really seeking to punish poor 
Walker. They called him “poor Walker,” 
as they called the other man “poor devil,” 
because they sympathized with such tools of 
the arch-conspirator. But they did expect 
that, in the searching analysis which would be 
made necessary in the proceedings before the 
grand jury of the county, and afterward in 
a trial in open court, testimony would be 
brought out, which would be published before 
tlie world, as to the origin of the constant at- 


SYBIL KNOX. 


273 


tacks made upon tke poor railway for whose 
rights they were making this struggle. And 
that testimony would be enough to place them 
advantageously before the great court of pub- 
lic opinion. 


CHAPTER XXIII. 


J OHN COUDERT had had but little to do 
with criminal law, in a practice not very 
long, but already, in its own line, very success- 
ful. But he had, in earlier life, met with 
grand juries once and again, in his experiences 
in the State of New York. Now that Mr. 
Scarlett permitted him to enter the room of 
the grand jury of Wilson County with him, he 
found many things in Western practice which 
were new to him : some which amused him, 
many which pleased him. Before half an 
hour was over, he felt that, if many formalities 
were omitted, which, to a tender-foot like him- 
self, would have been pleasing, there was a 
distinct determination to come at justice, 
though they advanced at the quick-step, and 
with few impediments. The proceedings be- 
fore a grand jury are not open to the public. 
They are conducted in definite and regular 
form, but with more of a conversational man- 


SYBIL KNOX. 


276 


ner, and, indeed, with more ease, than those 
of an established criminal court of the received 
pattern, when it rises above the methods of a 
simple justice’s tribunal. It would not be fair 
to say that a grand jury administers law in 
the fashion of a Cadi in the “Arabian Nights.” 
But there is more of the openness of what one 
might call the free interrogatory methods of 
the French courts, than we are all used to, in 
the somewhat reticent or suspicious habits of 
the more open criminal courts of America or 
of England. 

It would be impossible, as the lawyers de- 
cided, to bring the incendiary station-master 
to trial again. He had been tried, and con- 
victed, and was working out his sentence, too 
short, perhaps, for their notions of justice, but 
still a sentence assigned by the law. It w’as 
not in the county court at Dorcasville, there- 
fore, that the inquiry was held which now in- 
terests us, but in Wilson County, at Coram- 
ville itself, the county town, where Walker, 
once inspector on the C. & O., had been ar- 
rested, and where, as the reader knows, were 
the central offices of that hard-pressed com- 


276 


SYBIL KNOX. 


pany. But Coudert saw, to his satisfaction, 
that Berlitz was present, and at his side 
another man, who was, as he rightly supposed, 
the station-master. They had been brought 
across as witnesses. 

After hearing inquiries and listening to de- 
cisions in one or two other cases, in the very 
limited criminal calendar of the county, the 
foreman of the gand Jury was told that noth- 
ing was left but the matter of the 0. & 0. 
Railroad. He was told, and the jury of course 
were told, that the prosecuting officer of the 
county would bring before them evidence to 
show that there was a criminal conspiracy be- 
tween Obed Sherman Walker, who was pres- 
ent, who had been at the time of the alleged 
offence a division -inspector of cars on the C. & 
O., with one Benjamin Jefferson Mayberry, 
who was an engine-driver on the same road, 
and whom the attorney had hoped to bring 
forward at this time, but who had escaped, and 
with a switch-tender named Michael Sweeney, 
who had been killed in the collision which 
had resulted from the conspiracy. The jury 
were told that the case was the same case in 


SYBIL KNOX. 


277 


which their predecessors thirteen months be- 
fore had made inquest, but where they had 
then refused to bring in any bill. 

The attorney knew very well, he said, that 
this fact would prejudice the present jury 
against making a second inquiry, and he con- 
fessed that it ought to. But justice was justice, 
he said, even if long delayed. He knew that he 
was addressing the leading men of the county, 
and he knew that they were as anxious as he 
was, that Wilson County should not be known 
through the civilized world as the home of 
miscreants who went unpunished. The world 
knew Wilson County now, he said, by the 
terrible slaughter, called an accident, in which 
forty men and women, some of them sleeping 
in fancied security, had been of a sudden hur- 
ried into another world to meet the great Tri- 
bunal, which was the only Tribunal which 
knew no delays in justice. Ho true man in 
that county wished that the world should sup- 
pose that it had not manhood enough and 
courage enough to detect and to punish the 
wrong-doers. He had now in his possession 
what was, he was sure, sufficient evidence to 


278 


SYBIL KNOX. 


show to the jury who one of those wrong- 
doers was. It might be that the evidence as 
it was presented would implicate others. He 
was sure that, if the sheriffs of other counties 
were as active as their own sheriff had been, 
the man Mayberry might be brought before 
them, even before they were dismissed. The 
wretch Sweeney, who had, as the attorney be- 
lieved, turned the fatal switch, which had led 
the train to its destruction, had himself gone 
on the instant to the august Tribunal of 
which the attorney had reminded them. 

All of this address was rounded off and 
adorned with much more fustian than would 
ordinarily have been given to its decoration. 
But the presence of Scarlett, his distinguished 
chief, from the capital of the State, and of 
Coudert, whom he knew only as a New York 
lawyer brought in to assist Scarlett, did some- 
thing to turn the head of the local official. 

He then explained that he had put the case 
at the end of the calendar which he had pre- 
pared for the examination of the grand jury, 
because he had been waiting for an important 
witness, who had not, however, arrived. He 


SYBIL KNOX. 


279 


would go on without him as well as possible. 
At that very moment, however, the door of the 
room opened, and, led by an officer of the 
court, the great magnate of railroads came in. 
Neither Coudert nor Scarlett had ever seen him 
before, and, until this moment, Scarlett had 
not believed that he would come on any such 
summons as had been issued. Indeed, he 
felt that, in the very audacity of his appear- 
ance at such an inquiry, the man had scored 
an important point. He knew that the jury 
would be favorably impressed by the fact that 
a man whose goings and comings filled the 
world, was enough interested in Coram ville 
and Wilson County, and the session of the 
criminal court there, and the truth or falsehood 
of certain charges about the smash-up, to leave 
Wall Street and the manipulation of politics, 
to be present at their requisition. 

The witness was, in fact, the celebrated 
stock operator, Winfield Baal, who was, as 
Scarlett and Coudert were both sure, at the 
bottom of all the misfortunes of the C. & O. 
Neither of them had ever seen him, but 
neither of them had read a newspaper for five 


280 


SYBIL KNOX. 


years which had not done its part to contribute 
to the mystery which, in the eyes of ignorant 
people, surrounded him. 

For the man himself, he was, perhaps, the 
most unpretending-looking man in the room. 
His dress was simple, and his manner quiet. 
You might have thought him a schoolmaster, 
a little unbusiness-like, who had come to make 
a copy of his father’s will, and had turned to 
the left instead of going to the right, in the 
court-house. You would have said that he 
was on^ of the simple kind of men who are 
used to making such unpractical blunders. 

After a moment’s pause the attorney went 
on with his speech. The charge against 
Walker was that he had conspired with other 
persons to wreck a through freight train, 
known as 21, when it passed the Allendale 
station of the C. & 0. The intent was to throw 
the train off the proper track, at a place where 
it would rush down a high enbankment into 
the Willow Creek. In point of fact the night- 
express south crossed the trestle over Willow 
Creek just as the ill-fated freight train was 
crossing the down track, being behind time, 


SYBIL KNOX. 


281 


and trying to make up time so as to save an 
important connection. It had literally cut in 
two the freight train, which was crossing its 
track. In the collision its engine-driver and 
fireman were killed and nearly forty passen- 
gers and train-hands. 'No one supposed that 
this part of the calamity was intended by the 
conspirators. But it had followed upon it. 
And it was this awful fatality which had inter- 
ested the world in the inquiry which they were 
pursuing. But in pursuing that inquiry they 
must remember that the prisoner had shown 
his purpose on, at least, one other occasion. 
In a certain sense the jury would have to con- 
duct two inquiries. 

And yet, in a larger sense, these two in- 
quiries were one. The fated freight train — 
and he should show them why it was fated — 
had arrived at the station where it Avas 
wrecked four hours behind time. Had it been 
on time there would have been daylight, 
there would have been loresent half the people 
of the village, and all the station officers. 
The jury would soon learn that it was behind 
time because this man Walker meant that it 


282 


SYBIL KNOX. 


should be behind time. He was the inspector. 
He was the general inspector. Every man 
who had inspected the train at Adair had been 
appointed by him, and was under his orders. 
The jury would learn that at Adair, on this 
fatal day. Walker had refused the advice of 
his best subordinates. He had placed cars in 
that train which were not fit to go. “ G-entle- 
men, they were not fit to stand on a side- 
track for hog-pens.” Such a train never had 
started since railways were invented, accord- 
ing to the county attorney. So, as the brake- 
men would show them, the train had lost time 
all day. There had been hot boxes. There 
had been broken couplings. Cars had been in 
the wrong place, so that it took long to leave 
them at way-stations. “ What business, in 
fact, had these way-cars to be in a through 
train at all ? One of his minions placed them 
there.” 

For each of these failures he should have to 
produce a different witness, for he was en- 
gaged in that difficult business of proving a 
negative. But he would show them in seven 
different cases that this faithless inspector had 


SYBIL KNOX. 


283 


made himself personally responsible for the 
detail of omission or of commission which had 
resulted in this delay. This would be the first 
branch of their inquiry. He would then pro- 
ceed, by another inquiry, to show them how 
this delay was connected with the terrible col- 
lision in which both trains were crushed, in 
what men were pleased to call the accident 
with which the world rang. 

If the county attorney were given to a little 
fustian and mere decoration in his speech, yet 
he did his work well : he, or John Coudert 
behind him. The grand jury now had the 
benefit of the money which Coudert and his 
friends among the lambs of the C. & O. had 
contributed, for the expense of hunting up wit- 
nesses in a transaction which was now passing 
into history. There was a little host of these 
men. They , were all sent out of the court- 
room before the inquiry began, and they came 
in, one by one, to tell their stories. They 
were men of every grade of intelligence, as 
they were men of very different positions. 
Man after man told his different story of par- 
ticular failure where he had warned Walker 


284 


SYBIL KNOX. 


and where Walker had sent him about other 
business. In five separate cases the witnesses 
were brought under Coudert’s examination to 
say that they had told the boss that the car 
was not fit to go. In each case the boss had 
sworn at the man ; generally, indeed, giving 
him the same instruction, to “go to hell.” 

In one instance, indeed, a witness of literary 
turn produced his diary, in which he had 
written when he went home to supper : “ Had 
a row with the boss. Told him the through 
freight would go to hell before morning. ’ ’ It 
was this part of the inquiry which John 
Coudert had personally conducted in these 
hot summer weeks. As it went on, Mr. Win- 
field Baal sat quietly, sometimes listening to 
the witnesses with interest, sometimes reading 
his New York newspaper, and twice writing 
letters on a pocket-pad, which he had with 
him, as if they had been suggested to him by 
something which he had read. It was not till 
this branch of the inquiry was closed, and the 
prosecuting officer said that it was closed, and 
that he should now proceed to the other 
branch of the inquest, that Baal asked him. 


SYBIL KNOX. 


285 


perfectly civilly, if he could not arrange the 
inquiry so that his testimony might be taken 
before the departure of the afternoon express 
for St. Louis. “You will understand better 
than I can,” he said, “for I have no idea why 
I am called here at all. But I have too much 
respect for this county and its citizens, not to 
obey their call, even at some personal incon- 
venience.” He said this witlyiut any sneer or 
irony, and, indeed, there was something in his 
look, as he surveyed the room gravely, which 
would have given a stranger the impression 
that, after years of travel and care and 
anxiety, Mr. Baal had found in a corner room 
in the court-house of Coramville the place that 
best filled his noblest conceptions of architec- 
ture, of comfort, and of fitness for the purpose 
of life. Coudert could not but observe that at 
the moment of Baal’ s arrival in the court room 
the face of the prisoner had lighted up with 
relief and satisfaction. Every one else was 
looking at Baal ; but Coudert was looking at 
Walker. When again, after the long and 
tedious testimony, Baal made this courteous 
request of the county attorney. Walker again 


286 


SYBIL KNOX. 


sat up in his chair as if he were tired no 
longer, and the moment of his release had 
come. 

Coudert was more sure than ever, if possible, 
that the two men were in the same boat, and 
that the guilt of the one was the guilt of the 
other. 


CHAPTER XXIV. 


'this moment Mr. Scarlett,* the attorney 



for the State, rose, and said to Mr. Baal 
that the government would be able to meet his 
wishes. 

My brother has confided to me,” he said, 
the investigations into this part of the case, 
and I know the witnesses personally. The 
gentlemen of the grand jury may not recollect 
that, within a fortnight of the time of the col- 
lision, of which we have thus far been tracing 
the history, a station was burned, under cir- 
cumstances which excited general curiosity. 
An effort was made to secure justice in that 
matter, and the station-master was imprisoned, 
together with a traveller who was at the spot at 
the time, who was supposed to be an accom- 
plice. We shall show to you, gentlemen, that, 
within a few days before the burning of the 
station, the station-master and the man Walker 
here were in close conference in the station 


287 


288 


SYBIL KNOX. 


itself, and we shall show you that Mr. Win- 
field Baal, the president of the Great Midland 
Company, was in conference with them. This 
conference was held between the hours of 
twelve and one o’clock at night, not a time 
when the presidents of railroads are apt to cop- 
suit the subordinates of other and rival roads. 
We have not included Mr. Baal in the charge 
which we make of conspiracy, between Black, 
the station-master, and Walker, who is before 
you, and the engine-man, who has thus far es- 
caped us. But we are very desirous to know 
from Mr. Baal what passed in the interview to 
which I have alluded. As an unprejudiced 
third party,” and here there was a certain scorn 
in Mr. Scarlett’s manner, “he will be able to 
give to the jury testimony which will be of in- 
terest to them. Mr. Baal, you may take the 
stand.” 

At this little address it was clear to every- 
body who looked on that Mr. Baal was startled. 
He crossed the room and took the stand with 
an affected ease, but it was quite clear to every 
man on the jury, as it was clear to each of the 
counsel, that his ease was only affected. He 


SYBIL KNOX. 


took the oath, however, calmly, and with a 
reverential manner, and bowed to Mr. Scarlett, 
to intimate that he was ready for any ques- 
tions. 

The first question which was put to him was 
not what he had expected. He had supppsed, 
in the rapid moments he had had for thought, 
that he should be asked where he was on the 
night in question. But Mr. Scarlett said : 

“ What passed between Walker and Black 
in the interview to which I have alluded ? ” 

To this question Mr. Baal’ s answer was : 

“ How can you expect me to remember 
where I was on a given night fifteen months 
ago % I do not sleep twice in the same bed for 
ten successive nights, perhaps ; and now you 
ask me where I was on a particular evening.” 

Mr. Scarlett replied quietly : 

“ I have not asked you where you were. I 
asked you what passed between Walker and 
Black.” And thus, in their first encounter, 
Mr. Baal was overthrown, and a little rufiled. 
So soon as he had recovered himself, however, 
he spoke, in a dignified way, with perfect 
scorn of the attorney’s question. How should 


290 


SYBIL KNOX. 


he know what passed in the station of a road 
with which he had nothing to do ? It was his 
misfortune that he often had to use the line of 
the C. & O. road. He was sorry, for, in his 
opinion, it was a line very badly run, and, so 
far as he could judge from the testimony 
which he had been permitted to hear, it was 
not a wonder that passengers disliked it and 
avoided it. But the supposition that he was in 
one or another station, when he could possibly 
avoid being there, was absurd. 

Mr. Scarlett put several ingenious questions, 
trying to draw the witness from this position, 
but entirely in vain. Mr. Baal said again and 
again that the supposition was ridiculous ; that, 
although he knew the station in question per- 
fectly well, because he passed it three or four 
times a year as he went east and west, he had 
not set foot in it since the day of the County 
Fair, four or five years before. He remem- 
bered that he was there then, because at - that 
time he had been asked to make a speech at the 
dinner. 

“In point of fact,” he said, “I must have 
been in the sleeping-car eveiy time I have 


SYBIL KNOX. 


291 


passed through that town for the last four 
years. For it is my habit to go to sleep at nine 
every evening, and I know the schedule well 
enough to know that the trains in each direc- 
tion pass there after that hour.” 

With this ingenious mathematical statement 
he smiled rather malignly on the foreman, and 
then looked at Mr. Scarlett, as if to ask if 
there were any other testimony that could be 
expected from him. 

Scarlett said that he would not ask him to 
keep the stand any longer. “But I shall have 
occasion to call you again, and I have no ob- 
jection to your hearing what our other wit- 
nesses say.” He accordingly called in the 
next witness, who was in waiting. The exam- 
ination was fairly dramatic. 

“Mr. Stevenson, are you the conductor of 
the night-express on the Toothed Lightning ? ” 

“No, sir. I am the station-master at Adair. 
I was the conductor on the night-express till 
last January.” 

“Will you tell these gentlemen whom you 
know of the persons in this room who are not 
sitting on the grand jury?” 


292 


SYJ5IL KNOX. 


“I know you, sir, I know Mr. Coudert, and 
I know Mr. Baal,” bowing to Mr. Baal. 

“How long have you known Mr. Baal ? ” 

“I do not remember when I did not know 
him, sir. He often used to pass over the road. 
He is the president of the Great Midland, I 
think. He was the president of the Great Mid- 
land, and travelled tljrough upon their pass.” 

‘ ‘ Did you see him on the night of the fourth 
of June last year? ” 

*“! did, sir.” 

“ Where did you see him ? ” 

“He gave me a ticket for St. Louis on the 
night-express. I noticed the ticket because I 
knew he could travel on a pass, and he gener- 
ally did.” 

“Was he dressed as he was usually 
dressed ? ” 

“No, sir. He was dressed in a heavy ulster, 
with a Scotch cap. But I knew him. He un- 
buttoned his ulster when he gave me the 
ticket, and I knew the pin he wore. I had 
noticed it the week before, when he came out 
with me from St. Louis. I was surprised when 
he left the train at Homer.” 


SYBIL KNOX. 


293 


“You are sure that he left the train at 
Homer? ” 

“ I know he did, because I spoke of it at the 
office at Adair. I spoke of it to Malcolm, who 
was then ticket-master, and Malcolm left Adair 
the next day. He told me that night that he ■ 
had got a rise, and he has been the general 
ticket-agent at Pinzon ever since.” 

Here Mr. Baal rose in his seat, and said : 

“This good fellow is entirely mistaken. I 
know him perfectly, and he is a very intelli- 
gent officer, but he has wholly mistaken his 
man.” 

This was irregular, but, naturally enough, it 
was passed over. Mr. Scarlett then called 
Black, who came in with a great-coat over him, 
which covered his prison uniform. 

A few questions showed that he was in prison 
for the incendiarism. With great volubility he 
declared that the evidence was all false on 
which he had been convicted. Scarlett at- 
tempted to make him give some account of an 
interview, the week before, with Mr. Baal. 
But the man was perfectly firm in denying any 
such interview, and any hopes that Scarlett 


294 


SYBIL KNOX. 


had. had of confusing him proved quite vain. 
The attorney tlien produced, however, a scrap 
of paper, and said : 

“ Mr. Black, this paper was found at the 
bottom of your desk. Will you read it to the 
jury?” 

Black was evidently confused. He took the 
paper, began to read, and said he had not his 
glasses and could not read well. 

' “ It is not badly written,” said Mr. Scarlett. 
“ The foreman can read it to the jury.” And 
the foreman read : 

“Walker has the round-house on the Great 
Midland, Black has the station at Americas, 

has the inspec , Sweeney has two 

hundred and f ” 

The paper was torn across, so that the jagged 
end broke the words which were not fully 
spelled. 

“We shall show you, gentlemen,” said Scar- 
lett to the jury, “ where this paper was found. 
It was found under a false bottom in the sta- 
tion-master’s desk, and was only found there 
after the trial on which he has been im- 
prisoned. We expect to prove to you that the 


SYBIL KNOX. 


295 


words that are written there are in the hand- 
writing of Mr. Baal, whose testimony you have 
just now heard. Here are five letters of his, 
signed with his name, and on the office paper 
of the Great Midland. In these letters you 
will find, marked with red ink by ourselves, 
the word ^inspector,’ the word ‘Black,’ the 
word ‘station,’ and the word ‘round-house;’ 
and we ask you to observe the way in which 
he would have written the word ‘ Sweeney ’ as 
you will find it in the w^ord ‘ Swatara.’ It is 
that Mr. Baal may explain the resemblances of 
this handwriting at this period of the inquiry, 
that we have summoned him as a witness 
here.” 

At this Mr. Baal expressed some indigna- 
tion. It seemed he was trapped into a discus- 
sion of his own personal character. If the 
attorneys of the Cattaraugus and Opelousas 
Road had any charges to make against him let 
them make them. His office was perfectly 
well known, and nobody supposed he would 
run away — this with a sneer. His attorneys 
were thus and thus and so and so ; and any 
communication might be made to them. And 


296 


SYBIL KNOX. 


at this he looked round as if he were about to 
leave. 

‘^Not quite yet,” said Mi'. Scarlett, “we 
have several questions to put to you. Do I 
understand Mr. Baal to say that he knows 
nothing of this writing?” 

“I have already said that I never saw the 
man Black before I came into this room. 
What have I to do with the lower officers of 
the Cattaraugus and Opelousas? ” 

“ If Mr. Baal declines to testify to the writ- 
ing I will call the attention of the foreman and 
of the jury to this slip of paper,” said Mr. 
Scarlett. He stepped forward himself to the 
foreman, who held in his hand the half-sheet 
which he had read to the jury, and gave to 
him the other half-sheet, which had been 
torn from it. It was perfectly clear from 
the indentures that the sheets fitted to- 
gether. 

“ I have told you where we found the first 
of these sheets, gentlemen,” said Mr. Scarlett, 
standing close in the presence of the jury. 
“The other half came to us by mail last week 
from the wife of the witness Berlitz, who will 


SYBIL KNOX. 


297 


now be called, that he may tell you how it 
came to him.” 

Our old friend Gerhard Berlitz was then 
put on the stand. Mr. Scarlett handed him 
the second half of the sheet, and asked him if 
he recognized it. Berlitz was obliged to testify 
in German, but one of the jury who understood 
German and English was sworn as an inter- 
preter, and this caused but a moment’s delay. 
Berlitz looked with surprise upon the letter, 
and said it was the letter he wrote his little 
girl as soon as he knew where she was. “I 
had no other paper,” said he. “The prison- 
keeper had given me one sheet, and I had used 
that for my wife, and this sheet was a piece I 
had had with some tobacco in it ever since the 
morning I was arrested. I smoothed it out 
and wrote upon it.” 

“ Tell the jury where the sheet came from,” 
said Scarlett. And Berlitz said, without the 
least hesitation, that he had taken the piece of 
paper from between the rails as he walked up 
and down on the night when he was arrested. 
He had a piece of tobacco which he wanted to 
save for the next day, and he explained to the 


298 


SYBIL KNOX. 


jury at some length his reasons for wrapping 
this tobacco and tying it with a string. When 
he was arrested and imprisoned his other 
effects had been taken from him, but he had 
begged for the tobacco, and had been permitted 
to keep it. So he had the paper among the 
little fixtures of his cell in the House of Cor- 
rection, and, wishing to write to his daughter, 
he had written his letter on the blank page. 

Scarlett then turned the page, showed to the 
jury ',that the words were finished which had 
been unfinished on the paper he had first put 
in their hands. He then called their attention 
to the fact that this was a sheet of the ruled 
paper of the Great Midland Railway, and that 
it was a sheet of the form used in the presi- 
dent’s office. 

“ We do not ask you, gentlemen, to convict 
. anybody on this testimony. We shall intro- 
duce this piece of paper, if you find a bill, be- 
fore the jury which is to try this man Walker, 
and we shall introduce it as a part of the evi- 
dence which shows that the Great Midland Com- 
pany is responsible for all the series of acci- 
dents which have fallen upon this railway.” 


SYBIL KNOX. 


299 


John Coudert thought that Mr. Baal looked 
pale, but there was nothing in his manner to 
show that he was not the most unconcerned 
person in the room. 

Gerhard Berlitz then continued his testi- 
mony. But really there was nothing in it which 
had not come out on the case of incendiar- 
ism before, and it was impossible for either of 
the attorneys to draw from him anything but 
the most outside account of what had happened 
to him. Before he left the stand Mr. Scarlett 
said to him ; 

“ Mr. Berlitz, when your clothes were taken 
from you at the prison this pin was found 
among them ; ” and he handed to him a small 
pin with a single diamond in it. “ Are yon in 
the habit of wearing pins like this % ” 

Berlitz started as he looked at the pin, and 
for a moment seemed surprised. Then he said, 
almost as a man remembers a dream : 

“ Sir, I never wore the pin. I put it in my 
sleeve-cuff that I might save it. I found the 
pin between the slats of the seat on which I 
tried to sleep that night, when I was waiting 
for the train, before the fire. That was when I 


300 


SYBIL KNOX. 


went to the station-master. I went to tell him 
about the pin. But his office was shut, and I 
put it in my sleeve. When the fire came I 
forgot the pin was there.” 

Mr. Scarlett crossed the room to Mr. Baal, 
and showed to him the pin. “Do you remem- 
ber this pin ? Have you ever seen it before ? ” 

Baal looked upon it with scorn, and said : 

“ Of course I have never seen it before. I 
have never seen any of these people who are 
talking here.” 

“ So you said,” said Mi’. Scarlett ; and then, 
walking to the foreman, he said, “ If you will 
look on the back of the pin you will see the 
letters ‘ W. B.’ These letters stand for ‘ Win- 
field Baal.’ Our next .witness, Mr. Foreman, 
is the jeweller in New York who sold the pin 
to Mr. Baal six years ago, and who, at his or- 
ders, marked the back of it with the letters 
which you see. Call Mr. Erastus Tiffany.” 

As Mr. Erastus Tiffany entered the room 
there was a little pressure and confusion among 
people who tried to enter with him, but who 
were kept out by the officer at the door. When 
order was restored, and Mr. Tiffany took the 


SYBIL KNOX. 


301 


stand, it was observed that Mr. Baal was not 
in the room. Mr. Scarlett whispered to an 
officer, whom he directed to follow him, but 
the officer did not find Mr. Baal. Mr. Baal’s 
valise was never taken from the hotel where it 
had been left. And from that moment to this 
moment Mr. Baal has never been seen in the 
United States of Amei’ica. 

In the next morning’s issue of the New 
York papers the announcement was made 
with flaring headlines that, after an examina- 
tion before the grand jury of Wilson County, 
in the State of Franklin, Mr. Winfield Baal, the 
distinguished president of the Great Midland 
Company, had disappeared. His luggage was 
at the Pontiac House, but Mr. Baal had not 
apjieared to claim it. The papers regretted 
that, owing to the antiquated, prehistoric code 
of the State of Franklin, reporters had not been 
permitted to be present at the hearing before 
the grand jury. But it was generally under- 
stood in the town of Coramville that the hear- 
ing had related to an alleged conspiracy in 
which the Great Midland, under the direction 
of Mr. Baal, had brought about sundry wrecks 


302 


SYBIL KNOX. 


and misfortunes to the Cattaraugus and Opel- 
ousas. At immense length, the history of the 
accident of fifteen months before was related. 
In one way and another a column was filled with 
stating what the journals in question did not 
know, but what they thought the public ought 
to know. The upshot of the whole, however, 
was that Mr. Winfield Baal, fearful of the 
wrathy citizens of Wilson County, and more 
fearful of arrest and imprisonment, had left the 
town of Coramville. One intelligent reporter 
was sure he had seen him in St. Louis, two 
others were certain that he had been in Chicago, 
a fourth had visited his office in New York, to 
find that he had not been there for a week. 
And this was the beginning of a series of head- 
line articles with regard to Mr. Winfield Baal, 
which continued for a fortnight. It was then 
made sure that he had arrived safely in Mon- 
treal within twenty-four hours after he had left 
Coramville, and that at Montreal he had disap- 
peared. Whether at this moment Mr. Baal is 
living in a back province in Brazil, or in some 
unknown city in Spain, is a question which 
cannot be answered by this author. 


SYBIL KNOX, 


303 


When Sybil Knox heard, as she did hear at 
once, of this dramatic conclusion to the ter- 
rible drama in which her father’s railroad had 
so nearly been the Tphigenia of the sacrifice, 
she had the satisfaction of knowing that her 
own promptness, in sending to John Coudert 
the scrap of paper over which she had found 
little Clarchen Berlitz puzzling, had added one 
more to the threads which were twisted into 
the clew by which all parties worked their way 
to the daylight. 


CHAPTER XXV. 


HEN it was first whispered, and after- 



V Y ward publicly announced, in the room 
where the grand jury held its inquiry, that the 
great Mr. Baal had fled from the town, “ leav- 
ing his baggage at the Pontiac” — and this 
phrase was always added — every aspect of the 
case of the C. & O. was changed. The attor- 
neys suggested an adjournment, and the fore- 
man of the jury, with some pretext of more tes- 
timony, consented that the hearing should be 
finished the next day. 

The time was favorable for approaching the 
incendiary station-master again. And when 
Scarlett talked with him privately, and made 
it clear to him that he had nothing farther to 
hope from any loyalty to Baal, he broke down. 
He admitted that there had been a interview in 
which Baal had promised him, and had told 
him that he might promise the others, the 
places and the money named on the torn sheet 


304 


SYBIL KNOX. 


305 


of paper. Baal had refused to give him the 
paper, and had told him that the others must 
trust him. But when he had remonstrated, Baal 
had torn off the heading of the sheet, and had 
given him what was left. By some careless- 
ness Baal had thrown away his part without 
tearing it. In a halting way Black told this 
to the foreman and the jury the next morn- 
ing. 

But the interest in these poor wretches was 
at an end. They had merely been the catspaws 
of the great operator, who had in one blunder 
thrown away, so far as his own life was con- 
cerned, all the successes of years. 

To Sybil Knox, John Coudert telegraphed, 
“Victory. Your scrap of paper was enough. 
I will write at length, but I want you to know 
that all is well.” To Judge Kendrick, who 
was again in New York, he telegraphed, “B. 
has broken down and fled the country. All 
goes well.” As it happened, when this dis- 
patch arrived, Convers Knox, the cross kins- 
man who had insisted that Mrs. Knox should 
sell out her interest in the C. & O., and when 
she refused to do so had thrown up her af- 


306 


SYBIL KNOX. 


fairs, was in Judge Kendrick’s office. Judge 
Kendrick lost his kead for a moment, and read 
the dispatch to Mr. Knox, who was giving him 
some details which it was necessary that he 
should know regarding Mrs. Knox’s affairs. 
Convers Knox excused himself as soon as he 
could, and going to Wall Street bought C. & O. 
securities as largely as he dared, and much more 
largely than he should have done, on the 
strength of the information which he had re- 
ceived. This was the first intimation which 
“ the street ” had that anything had happened 
to the poor struggling railroad. From that 
time, however, it may be said that its interests 
steadily advanced, and that it recovered the 
honorable position which, in elder days, it had 
held among investors. Convers Knox made 
more money than it is worth while to tell on 
the accident by which Judge Kendrick had put 
into his hands this bit of information. For 
the judge himself, as for John Coudert, Scar- 
lett, and Governor Needham, the whole busi- 
ness was a sort of sacred trust ; and any one of 
them would have been ashamed to stain his 
hands in any transaction by which he should 


SYBIL KNOX. 


807 


make money from the simple administration of 
justice. And when we have said this, we may 
relieve the reader from following the details of 
law or of the exchange. 

John Coudert himself could not do what he 
would have been glad to do — take an express 
train, telegraph in advance for private trains to 
be ready for him at every way-station, and so 
fly, faster than Aladdin ever flew, from Coram- 
ville to Atherton, as lovers will, even though 
they be more than thirty years of age. He had 
his duties still. He had to remain with his 
“ Brother Scarlett,” and with the other brother 
who was the county attorney of Wilson 
County, till the presentation of the grand jury 
was complete, and until a true bill of indict- 
ment had been found against Walker, the car- 
inspector. But, as has been intimated, all 
these proceedings were languid indeed, com- 
pared with those with which the inquest had 
begun. It seemed a shame, indeed it seemed 
mortifying, that poor Walker and Black 
should be paying this penalty where the sin of 
the other was so much greater than theirs. It 
seemed hard that they, who had been led into 


308 


SYBIL KNOX. 


temptation, should suffer when the tempter 
escaped. 

For Gerhard Berlitz, of course, the revela- 
tions made before the grand inquest meant 
liberty. It required but a day for Scarlett to 
advise “jolly Ned Needham” that Berlitz’s 
testimony had proved of the first value in the 
cause of justice, and that, by Black’ sown con- 
fession, Berlitz had no connection whatever 
with the fire, excepting that he was the first 
person to give an alarm. By the return of the 
mail, therefore, there came a full pardon from 
the governor for the poor German, and a pub- 
lic announcement was made, with all solem- 
nity, of the regret of the executive that a ver- 
dict which was evidently a mistaken verdict 
should have condemned him, and that he had 
suffered so long. The governor himself sent a 
handsome present to the poor fellow, and other 
gentlemen in the State made it their business 
to write to express their mortification and re- 
gret for what had happened. In every way 
possible, he was assured that his reputation 
could receive no stain, and that he went out as 


SYBIL KNOX. 


3p9 


a free man, with the confidence and respect of 
all who knew him. When he was well shaven, 
and dressed in the Sunday best of happier 
times, which had been kept for him in the 
store-houses of the benevolent prison-keeper, 
Berlitz looked like another man. And when 
Coudert shook hands with him, as he took the 
express train for Buffalo, Albany, and so for 
Atherton, envying him the good fortune which 
was to conduct him to that paradise, it seemed 
impossible that he was the same dogged, down- 
cast, and wretched creature whom, but so few 
weeks before, he had called for his first inter- 
view in the harness-room. 

Eightly or wrongly, the attorney-general, 
Scarlett, declined to press before the jury the 
original proposal, by which Black might have 
been included as one of the consj)irators with 
Walker for the wreck of the train. “It is % 
bad mess,” he said, “the whole of it. We are 
punishing one man for the sin of another, and 
the other has got away. Black has given the 
State, on the whole, very valuable testimony, 
and I will be no party to seeing that he has an- 


310 


SYBIL KNOX. 


other term of confinement after this one is 
over.” And with this rough bit of what per- 
haps savors of Lynch law, Black returned to 
his cell, and to his remaining months of sen- 
tence. 


CHAPTER XXVL 


TELEGRAM is sent from some scene of 



_AJL wild excitement, of hope and joy, or 
of dead despair. It arrives in a place wdth 
another atmosphere, of which the surround- 
ings are so different that you can hardly 
believe that they belong to the same world. 
A war-correspondent writes his dispatch on a 
drum-head, in the midst of shot and bursting 
shells. And it comes to a quiet attic, where 
a quiet night-editor is trying to determine 
whether his public on the morrow will be more 
interested in a Bethel Sunday-school excur- 
sion or in the match in which Hopkinson’s 
School beat the High School. Such was the 
fate of John Coudert’s dispatch to Sybil 
Knox. It left the heated frenzy of surprise, 
doubt, despair, on the one side, and victory on 
the other. It was read in Mrs. Knox’s parlor, 
where the Order of Send Me had its first 
monthly meeting after her initiation. 


311 


312 


SYBIL KNOX. 


The meeting had been reverently opened by 
the little ritual service, and the secretary had 
read her short report, which could hardly help 
being funny, which combined the various sug- 
gestions and narratives of the last meeting. 
The verbal reports of different committees were 
received, and then Mrs. Carrigan, with a good 
deal of feeling, said : 

“Girls all — and Mrs. Knox will not mind if 
we call her a girl — before we come on regular 
work there is one thing I must say, and I will 
clear my mind now. There is not one word on 
the records about Mrs. Edwards. That must 
be right, because what records are for, I 
believe, is to conceal the truth of history, so 
that the next generation may not know how 
we live and move and earn our living. And 
I am glad for many reasons that poor Mrs. 
Edwards — dear Mrs. Edwards, I am going to 
say — does not appear there. But I know, 
and you know, that Mrs. Edwards and her 
gossiping tongue have cost this Order a good 
deal of time this fall. 

“Now, shortly, what I want to say is this. 
The poor dear soul came to see me yesterday, 


SYBIL KNOX. 


313 


and she had a good cry. She cried, and before 
she was done I cried. She said that she 
was — well, she said more than was worth 
while about that — she was ever so much 
obliged for what Mr. Carrigan did for her poor 
boy. The boy is all right ; he is in the 
clothes-pin factory at Asney, or is going to 
be there. And she says he has learned his 
lesson, and will know how to hold his tongue 
when he has nothing to say. 

“I tried to make her laugh, and I told her 
that that was the greatest lesson that any one 
ever learned, and the hardest. But she would 
not laugh. , She said so. She said, so sadly, 
that she wished she could laugh as she used 
to. But she said she should never be so light- 
hearted again. That a boy of hers should be 
in prison — that was terrible. 

“But she had come to say to me, as if I 
were a sort of priestess, you know, that she 
had learned her lesson too. And she wanted 
to make me say that I would publicly an- 
nounce, at the sewing society and wherever I 
chose, that she saw her fault and that she 
would mend it. And poor I — I was crying as 


314 


SYBIL KNOX. 


hard as she was — and I tried to say that she 
judged herself too hardly ; and the words 
choked in my throat. For she has not ; she 
has done no end of mischief, and she knows it, 
and I know it. So I said nothing, but just 
kissed her. And that is all, girls. But that is 
the reason why I call her dear Mrs. Edwards, 
because I am so sorry for her. Now there is 
not a word of this to go on our books. But 
the Recording Angel has it on his book 
already, for it is by far the most important 
thing that Atherton has shown this summer. 

“ Now, Mrs. Knox, if you like to tell us how 
to talk French, we will learn.” 

So the girls, who had been surprised to hear 
the impetuous lady say “dear Mrs. Edwards ” 
of the woman whom, the week before, she had 
most disliked of their little* circle, had their 
answer. 

Mrs. Knox and Miss Robideau plunged into 
the story of the Canadian reading-room, with 
its surprises, its many failures, and its occa- 
sional successes. All the little company lis- 
tened and laughed or sighed as the varying 
waves of the story lifted or depressed them. 


SYBIL KNOX. 


815 


It was in the midst of this that they saw the 
telegraph boy’s bicycle. Everybody knew 
him, and his yellow envelope was brought in. 

Sybil Knox took the dispatch as she always 
did. A telegram always frightens a woman. 
But she — she had that cruel feeling that she 
had gone through the worst that life could 
offer, and that she tsould never have ntterly 
bad news again. She did not tear open the 
cover. She signed the receipt first, bade them 
tell the boy to wait, and then excused herself 
as she took the dispatch to the next room. 
When she returned, Mrs. Carrigan, watching 
her with all the instincts of a real friend, 
knew that one of the great successes of life 
had been won. , 

But she was a friend too true even to ask be- 
fore they went away what it was which made 
Sybil Knox more gentle, more active, more 
friendly, more wise, more sympathetic, more 
everything that is good than even she had 
ever seemed before. 

And after a few days, late at night, the 
Knox horses and carriage were at the station 


316 


SYBIL KNOX. 


at Quarry Village, and in the carriage were 
Frau Berlitz and the wondering little Clarchen. 
And when the dazed and doubtful Gerhard 
stumbled out of the car, and looked round 
him on the platform, his wife saw him and 
rushed for him, flung her arms round him and 
kissed him, and little Clarchen pulled his 
arm and cried out, “Clarchen auch, Clarchen 
auch ! Hier bin ich, hier bin ich ! ” 

And, to Berlitz’ s astonishment, he was made 
to sit in a carriage as grand as that of the 
hereditary forester, and to drive through 
forests more magnificent than the hereditary 
forester ever saw. Clarchen was happily 
asleep on her father’s knees; his happy wife 
rested her head on his shoulder. She said 
little, he said little, but the years of wretched- 
ness were swept away and the two began to 
live again. Sometimes they roused up to ask 
this question or that. But each of them knew 
that this talking was rather a function or 
form. It was to deceive the coachman rather 
than to deceive themselves. For themselves 
it was enough that they were together. 
“Together” was the whole. 


SYBIL KNOX. 


317 


It was almost a week later that John 
Coudert appeared at the Chittenden, and, 
after he had reformed his dress, asked the 
way to Mrs. Knox’s, and walked up to the 
house. He tried not to seem eager to the 
“attentive clerk,” who was wondering what 
business sent him to Atherton. Fortunately 
for him, the smiling and beanjing Clarchen, 
who recognized him in a moment, when she 
came to the door, said that Mrs. Knox was at 
home. 

Had he said what he came to say and longed 
to say, when she came smiling into the parlor 
and gave him both her hands, it would have 
been : 

“Dear Mrs. Knox, I have tried for the last 
six months to live without you, and I can- 
not.” 

But the proprieties of modern life hindered 
him. He could only accept her ready con- 
gratulations. He threw off his light overcoat 
as he was bidden. He answered, in a fashion, 
all her proper questions about his journey, 
about the hotel, and the rest. And when this 
regulation “opening” had been well pushed 


318 


SYBIL KNOX. 


through, each moving the right pawn as usage 
directs, she said : 

“Now tell the whole, Mr. Coudert. We 
have all the afternoon. No one shall interrupt 
us.” And she even struck the bell, and said 
in German to the little girl, “Mr. Coudert has 
come on important business. You must say 
that I am very much engaged.” 

And so John Coudert, who had something 
else so near his heart, had to go back to that 
long story of which the reader knows a little. 
The reader, more fortunate than Mr. Coudert, 
has had the kindly help of this author, who 
has omitted from the narration all that is not 
absolutely important. But John Coudert is a 
good story-teller, and he had a good listener. 
How he tried to guess, as he talked, whether 
all her interest were interest in the story or in 
Berlitz, how he tried to hope from her smile or 
from her tone of voice, or from her eye, that 
there was some little interest in him. Was she 
glad of success, or was she glad that he had 
succeeded? Was she sorry for failure, or was 
she sorry that he had failed ? Who should 
say? 


SYBIL KNOX. 


319 


She did not say. She was a true woman, . 
and after the two hours of their talk her secret 
was her own. 

She touched the bell. ‘‘ Clarchen, tell Mrs. 
Chittenden to send us some tea, and bid them 
send round the carriage. I am going to take two 
nice girls to drive, Mr. Coudert, and I am so 
pleased to have you for the fourth. We will 
show you our f^rettiest drive. And then you 
must come back and dine.” 

And she did so. She had promised Blanche 
Wilders pin and Mary to call for them. There 
was time for a perfect sunset view, and for the 
drive home just so as not to be late for dinner. 
She had sent for Colonel Carrigan and Mrs. 
Carrigan, and till he bade her good-evening and 
went away in the Carrigan’ s carriage, he did 
not have another word with her alone. 

‘‘May I come round in the morning to take 
you to the marble quarries ? ” said the hospita- 
ble Colonel Carrigan, as they parted at the 
hotel. 

Horror was in the thought ! A morning at 
a marble quarry, which he must spend at the 
Knox house ? Never ! He mumbled some- 


320 


SYBIL KNOX. 


thing about his letters, and writing for the 
mail, but had to hear the colonel say he should 
come round to make plans in the morning. 

And that night he had to spend in wonder- 
ing. He knew no more of his fortunes with 
Sybil Knox than he knew the night before, 
when he tossed and pitched on the billows of a 
Wagner car. 

The next morning he shook off Colonel Car- 
rigan, and rang again at Sybil Knox’s door. 
Was he a little pale as he greeted her? And 
was she ? She did not give him both hands 
again. 

And he would not even sit down as she asked 
him to .do. 

“No,” said he, “ not yet. Perhaps you will 
not want me to stay,” this with a sick smile. 
‘ ‘ This time I have not come to talk of wrecks 
and wreckers, but of myself and you. Dear Mrs. 
Knox, when I bade you good-bye in Europe I 
longed to tell you so. All summer long I would 
have told you so. But I had no right to do so. I 
have no right to say so now, but I cannot help 
saying it. I have come to Atherton to say so. 
To say how lonely I have been all summer, be- 


SYBIL KNOX. 


321 


cause I knew you were here, and I — oh, so far 
away.” 

And she looked down, and she looked up. 
She looked down and blushed, she looked up 
and smiled. 

And she said, “It is so good that you are 
here now.” 


THE END. 


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